[GRASS5] documentation encoding

Jean-Denis Giguere jdenisgiguere at fastmail.fm
Thu Apr 29 14:08:01 EDT 2004


On Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:51:18 +0100, "Glynn Clements"
<glynn.clements at virgin.net> said:
> 
> Jean-Denis Giguere wrote:
> 
> > I have started some work on translation of documentation. I think that 
> > using utf-8 instead of latin-1 for encoding could help much translation 
> > effort. If everyone use the same encoding, it will also help dealing 
> > with special characters like & et > issues.
> 
> The encoding should be appropriate for the specific locale. E.g. Alex'
> Russian translations all use KOI8-R, which is the encoding which is
> most commonly used in Russia (far more common than ISO-8859-5 or
> UTF-8).
> 
> In spite of the hype, UTF-8 is far from being in widespread use. It's
> widespread support (in libraries and applications) springs more from a
> desire by programmers to avoid having to deal with encoding issues
> than actual usage.

Is it not a good reason ? I think docbook is a very good choice for
documentation. There are useful tools to translate this format. POT and
PO files are easy to manage and help to keep documentation translation up
to date. How can you deal with translation template (.POT) if each
translator work with his own encoding. It can be painful to maintain
translation if we don't have common tools. 
> 
> IMHO, it would be preferable to use the ISO-8859-* encodings where
> possible. ISO-8859-* text can be automatically converted to UTF-8
> using iconv, but the reverse isn't necessarily true.

I never see this restriction, but it may be possible.
> 
> -- 
> Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>
-- 
  Jean-Denis Giguere
  jdenisgiguere at fastmail.fm

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