Re: Texinfo::Report::gdt

[Gavin Smith]

On 10 April 2015 at 23:12, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>     * error reporting within the gdt strings is not easy as it doesn't
>       flow naturally in the document.
>
> But should affect only the translators, and they should be able to deal.
> And, if we provided some kind of validator for translators as above, it
> could help them.
This refers to erroneous Texinfo syntax in the strings, correct?

>> it could be
>> msgid "{category} on {class}: <strong>{name}</strong>"
>
> I don't understand how this can work.  Translators cannot provide
> per-output-format translations, nor would we want to impose that work on
> them even if they could.  That's what Texinfo is for :).

Looking at texinfo_document.pot, I thought this was already the case.
The translation document strings look like they are generic, but they
actually are specific to the output format, e.g. the example above is
actually

#: tp/Texinfo/Convert/HTML.pm:4102
#, perl-brace-format
msgid "{category} on {class}: @strong{{name}}"
msgstr ""

so is only used for HTML output.

>> Some of the translation strings use Texinfo commands for characters,
>> e.g. "@'e".  This would have to be replaced with whatever method other
>> programs using gettext use for special characters.
>
> I don't know of any such alternative method for special characters.
> All I have ever seen in .po files is literal UTF-8 or Latin 1 or ...
> In fact, using Texinfo commands is the most elegant and
> encoding-agnostic solution I have seen.

I am not sure what can go wrong with the .po files being literal UTF-8
- I will try to understand this better.