[postgis-devel] Multi-Lingual Docs

[Paul Ramsey]

Hi All,

I'm at the FOSS4G code sprint today, and have been discussing
multi-lingual documentation with Til Adams and Daniel Kastl. Given
that we've had 3rd party translations to fr and pt in the past, it
would be great to pull the i18n community into the main documentation
process, by making the docs multi-lingual.

This project seems to provide a template for doing multi-lingual
docbook in unified way, with a minimal amount of duplication (in
particular, we want to avoid duplicating things like the diagram
generation and the SQL code examples and so on across translations).

http://docbooksml.sourceforge.net/

The translations then end up looking like this:

    <title>
      <phrase lang="en">What is DocBook.sml?</phrase>
      <phrase lang="de">Was ist DocBook.sml?</phrase>
    </title>

The translation blocks can be as granular (as above) or blocked (doing
whole sections in translation or whole chapters) as you want. So we'd
probably have different granularity in different sections. Reference
manual very granular (because there's so much code example and
parameter stuff that is language-independent) and tutorial sections
less granular (because there's so many translatable words in blocks).

Til is doing some experiments with docbooksml and will show us what a
working multi-lingual set-up would look like when he gets it running
(posting a postgis source tarball with the multilingual approach
implemented that we can download and try). Then we can decide
how/if/when to integrate it into our working doc system.

Thoughts?

Paul