[Po4a-devel]Some patches for the Man module

[Nicolas François]

Hello all,

I could defend my patches on IRC in front of Denis yesterday ;)

I've got the log of the irc session, and can share it if Denis agree.
(note : it won't be useful if you can't read french)


Denis proposed some modifications on the patches, which I will do, test
and probably commit this week-end.


Aside from the review of the patches, we discussed about these points :
(all but the last one are related to the man module)

  - quotes
    \(lq and \(rq are transformed to `` and '' before the translation and
    reversed back to \(lq and \(rq in the groff page.
    This can be an issue in the following string (I'm pretty sure I've
    seen something like this somewhere, but can find it back) :
        You can provide an empty argument with --arg ''
    (we don't want a single double quote, but a double single quote here)
    or (in man aptitude) :
        ``aptitude  markauto '~slibs'''
    (this is probably impossible to detect which couple of single quote
    has to be converted to \(rq in such a string)


    An idea could be to use UTF-8 quotes, but this force using UTF-8 POs,
    and would require a -L option for po4a-translate (for example french
    manpages should be converted to iso-8859-1)

    Another idea is to keep the conversion of \(lq and \(rq, and let the
    user use her quotes in the translation.

  - non ASCII in msgid strings
    currently, msgids can contain xA0 (non breaking space) characters,
    which cause warnings during execution of po4a or msgcat on the po.

  - groff's font size modifier
    .SB macro is no more handled with my patches (but was buggy).
    ".SB foo bar" should be equivalent to ".SM \fBfoo bar\f(P or R)"
    A special handling could be necessary for .SM, not to break sentences
    (this wont be easy to test, because size doesn't matter in terminals)
    Other font size modifiers (\s-n \s+n) are currently given to the
    translator, who may be not aware of groff.

  - -M option for po4a-normalize
    Adding this option should be OK.
    This may be only useful for me : it allow to use more pages for
    the regression test tool (most of the non ASCII characters are due to
    author names, which is something I can't blame;)

I hope I didn't forget / misunderstood anything.

Regards,
-- 
Nekral