[Po4a-devel] IUF Rulebook translation

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Felix Dietze (2012-11-08 16:04:15)
> Dear po4a team,
>    I'd like to renew the workflow of the rulebook of the international
>    unicycling federation. It's a big document (~100 pages) with competition
>    rules for unicycling. It is constantly changing, because the sport is very
>    young and developed a lot. Sadly there is no space for experimental rules
>    that need to be tested first.
>    Right now it is written in MSWord, passed around by email and the
>    translations are not coordinated very well. This worked out for the last
>    10 years, but I think today we can do much better.
>    How I think it should work:
>    - Many people should be able to write differnt parts of the document at
>    the same time
>    - People need to know what changed at which time, so we need version
>    control
>    - There should be versions with experimental rulesets for testing
>    competitions
>    � - If an experimental rule works out, it can be merged into the master
>    document
>    - The translation should be done collaboratively by the community
>    - people should be able to view the current versions (including
>    translations) online and/or print them
>    - If a change to a master/experimental document is made, the translation
>    system is automatically updated, so that the community can start to
>    translate changes immediately. (No regular admin interaction)
>    Here are my ideas so far:
>    - Rewrite the whole thing in LaTeX (can render to HTML or PDF)
>    - Put it in a git repository and manage experimental versions as branches
>    - With every commit render the pdf and html versions.
>    - Translate it (and also the experimental branches) collaboratively with
>    po4a and Pootle and also render the translated documents automatically
>    I think this could solve the issue. But before we start to work I want to
>    know if this is the right approach. Latex and git are no problem. But for
>    the translation I'm not sure.
>    With a new commit in git, we could trigger a po4a-updatepo for the changed
>    latex files in every branch. But is it possible to automatically reinject
>    them into Pootle? How do the translations flow back from Pootle to the
>    build system. If a new language is set up in Pootle, how does it create
>    new documents? Can we do version control for the languages to be able to
>    jump back to an older version of a document with proper translation?
>    I guess you can answer these questions easily and support us to set this
>    up properly.

Not really what you ask, but related: If there is little need for rich 
markup of collaboratively edited content (as opposed to possibly 
less-collaborative styling), I dearly recommend that you have a look at 
Pandoc, and track not LaTeX but Markdown as master centent format.

I was somewhat involved in the development of the 
http://islandsofresilience.eu/ and for that threw together a structure 
that supported both online annotation, online wiki-like editing (in 
multiple branches if you like, each hosted on separate subdomain) and 
offline git-based markdown editing.  And then separate HTML5/CSS3 and 
LaTeX styling for web and print outputs, respectively.

Our project did not involve l10n (and for second round of public review 
the content authors chose a different administration approach than my 
framework), but such addition should be possible: po4a supports Markdown 
(I wrote that ;-).

Sources for my work is here: 
http://source.epfsug.biks.dk/?p=resilience.git


Hope that is of some use/inspiration.

 - Jonas
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