Provided by: po4a_0.45-1_all bug

NAME

       Locale::Po4a::Man - convert manual pages from/to PO files

DESCRIPTION

       The po4a (PO for anything) project goal is to ease translations (and more interestingly,
       the maintenance of translations) using gettext tools on areas where they were not expected
       like documentation.

       Locale::Po4a::Man is a module to help the translation of documentation in the nroff format
       (the language of manual pages) into other [human] languages.

TRANSLATING WITH PO4A::MAN

       This module tries pretty hard to make translator's life easier. For that, the text
       presented to translators isn't a verbatim copy of the text found in the man page. Indeed,
       the cruder parts of the nroff format are hidden, so that translators can't mess up with
       them.

   Text wrapping
       Unindented paragraphs are automatically rewrapped for the translator.  This can lead to
       some minor difference in the generated output, since the rewrapping rules used by groff
       aren't very clear. For example, two spaces after a parenthesis are sometimes preserved.

       Anyway, the difference will only be about the position of the extra spaces in wrapped
       paragraph, and I think it's worth.

   Font specification
       The first change is about font change specifications.  In nroff, there are several ways to
       specify if a given word should be written in small, bold or italics. In the text to
       translate, there is only one way, borrowed from the POD (Perl online documentation)
       format:

       I<text> -- italic text
           equivalent to \fItext\fP or ".I text"

       B<text> -- bold text
           equivalent to \fBtext\fP or ".B text"

       R<text> -- roman text
           equivalent to \fRtext\fP

       CW<text> -- constant width text
           equivalent to \f(CWtext\fP or ".CW text"

       Remark: The CW face is not available for all groff devices. It is not recommended to use
       it. It is provided for your convenience.

   Automatic characters transliteration
       Po4a automatically transliterate some characters to ease the translation or the review of
       the translation.  Here is the list of the transliterations:

       hyphens
           Hyphens (-) and minus signs (\-) in man pages are all transliterated as simple dashes
           (-) in the PO file.  Then all dash are transliterated into roff minus signs (\-) when
           the translation is inserted into the output document.

           Translators can force an hyphen by using the roff glyph '\[hy]' in their translations.

       non-breaking spaces
           Translators can use non-breaking spaces in their translations.  These non-breaking
           spaces (0xA0 in latin1) will be transliterated into a roff non-breaking space ('\ ').

       quotes transliterations
           `` and '' are respectively tranliterated into \*(lq and \*(rq.

           To avoid these transliterations, translators can insert a zero width roff character
           (i.e., using `\&` or '\&' respectively).

   Putting '<' and '>' in translations
       Since these chars are used to delimit parts under font modification, you can't use them
       verbatim. Use E<lt> and E<gt> instead (as in POD, one more time).

OPTIONS ACCEPTED BY THIS MODULE

       These are this module's particular options:

       debug
           Activate debugging for some internal mechanisms of this module.  Use the source to see
           which parts can be debugged.

       verbose
           Increase verbosity.

       groff_code
           This option permits to change the behavior of the module when it encounter a .de, .ie
           or .if section. It can take the following values:

           fail
               This is the default value.  The module will fail when a .de, .ie or .if section is
               encountered.

           verbatim
               Indicates that the .de, .ie or .if sections must be copied as is from the original
               to the translated document.

           translate
               Indicates that the .de, .ie or .if sections will be proposed for the translation.
               You should only use this option if a translatable string is contained in one of
               these section. Otherwise, verbatim should be preferred.

       generated
           This option specifies that the file was generated, and that po4a should not try to
           detect if the man pages was generated from another format.  This permits to use po4a
           on generated man pages.  This option does not take any argument.

       mdoc
           This option is only useful for mdoc pages.

           It selects a stricter support of the mdoc format by telling po4a not to translate the
           'NAME' section.  mdoc pages whose 'NAME' section is translated won't generate any
           header or footer.

           According to the groff_mdoc page, the NAME, SYNOPSIS and DESCRIPTION sections are
           mandatory.  There are no known issues with translated SYNOPSIS or DESCRIPTION section,
           but you can also specify these sections this way:
            -o mdoc=NAME,SYNOPSIS,DESCRIPTION

           This mdoc issue can also be solved with an addendum like this one:
            PO4A-HEADER:mode=before;position=^.Dd
            .TH DOCUMENT_TITLE 1 "Month day, year" OS "Section Name"

       The following options permit to specify the behavior of a new macro (defined with a .de
       request), or of a macro not supported by po4a.  They take as argument a comma-separated
       list of macros.  For example:

        -o noarg=FO,OB,AR -o translate_joined=BA,ZQ,UX

       Note: if a macro is not supported by po4a and if you consider that it is a standard roff
       macro, you should submit it to the po4a development team.

       untranslated
           untranslated indicates that this macro (at its arguments) don't have to be translated.

       noarg
           noarg is like untranslated, except that po4a will verify that no argument is added to
           this macro.

       translate_joined
           translate_joined indicates that po4a must propose to translate the arguments of the
           macro.

       translate_each
           With translate_each, the arguments will also be proposed for the translation, except
           that each one will be translated separately.

       no_wrap
           This option takes as argument a list of comma-separated couples begin:end, where begin
           and end are commands that delimit the begin and end of a section that should not be
           rewrapped.

           Note: no test is done to ensure that an end command matches its begin command; any
           ending command stop the no_wrap mode.  If you have a begin (respectively end) macro
           that has no end (respectively begin), you can specify an existing end (like fi) or
           begin (like nf) as a counterpart.  These macros (and their arguments) wont be
           translated.

       inline
           This option specifies a list of comma-separated macros that must not split the current
           paragraph. The string to translate will then contain foo <.bar baz qux> quux, where
           bar is the command that should be inlined, and baz qux its arguments.

       unknown_macros
           This option indicates how po4a should behave when an unknown macro is found.  By
           default, po4a fails with a warning.  It can take the following values: failed (the
           default value), untranslated, noarg, translate_joined, or translate_each (see above
           for an explanation of these values).

AUTHORING MAN PAGES COMPLIANT WITH PO4A::MAN

       This module is still very limited, and will always be, because it's not a real nroff
       interpreter. It would be possible to do a real nroff interpreter, to allow authors to use
       all the existing macros, or even to define new ones in their pages, but we didn't want to.
       It would be too difficult, and we thought it wasn't necessary. We do think that if
       manpages' authors want to see their productions translated, they may have to adapt to ease
       the work of translators.

       So, the man parser implemented in po4a have some known limitations we are not really
       inclined to correct, and which will constitute some pitfalls you'll have to avoid if you
       want to see translators taking care of your documentation.

   Don't program in nroff
       nroff is a complete programming language, with macro definition, conditionals and so on.
       Since this parser isn't a fully featured nroff interpreter, it will fail on pages using
       these facilities (There are about 200 such pages on my box).

   Use the plain macro set
       There are still some macros which are not supported by po4a::man. This is only because I
       failed to find any documentation about them. Here is the list of unsupported macros used
       on my box. Note that this list isn't exhaustive since the program fails on the first
       encountered unsupported macro. If you have any information about some of these macros,
       I'll happily add support for them. Because of these macros, about 250 pages on my box are
       inaccessible to po4a::man.

        ..               ."              .AT             .b              .bank
        .BE              ..br            .Bu             .BUGS           .BY
        .ce              .dbmmanage      .do                             .En
        .EP              .EX             .Fi             .hw             .i
        .Id              .l              .LO             .mf
        .N               .na             .NF             .nh             .nl
        .Nm              .ns             .NXR            .OPTIONS        .PB
        .pp              .PR             .PRE            .PU             .REq
        .RH              .rn             .S<             .sh             .SI
        .splitfont       .Sx             .T              .TF             .The
        .TT              .UC             .ul             .Vb             .zZ

   Hiding text from po4a
       Sometimes, the author knows that some parts are not translatable, and should not be
       extracted by po4a. For example, an option may accept an other argument, and other may also
       appear as the last item of a list. In the first case, other should be not be translatable.
       And in the second case, other should be translated.

       In such case, the author can avoid po4a to extract some strings, using some special groff
       constructs:

        .if !'po4a'hide' .B other

       (this will require the -o groff_code=verbatim option)

       A new macro can also be defined to automate this:
        .de IR_untranslated
        .    IR \\$@
        ..

        .IR_untranslated \-q ", " \-\-quiet

       (this will require the options -o groff_code=verbatim and -o untranslated=IR_untranslated;
       with this construct, the .if !'po4a'hide' conditional is not strictly needed since po4a
       will not parse the internal of the macro definition)

       or using an alias:
        .als IR_untranslated IR

        .IR_untranslated \-q ", " \-\-quiet

       (this will require the -o untranslated=als,IR_untranslated option)

   Conclusion
       To summarise this section, keep simple, and don't try to be clever while authoring your
       man pages. A lot of things are possible in nroff, and not supported by this parser. For
       example, don't try to mess with \c to interrupt the text processing (like 40 pages on my
       box do). Or, be sure to put the macro arguments on the same line that the macro itself. I
       know that it's valid in nroff, but would complicate too much the parser to be handled.

       Of course, another possibility is to use another format, more translator friendly (like
       POD using po4a::pod, or one of the XML familly like SGML), but thanks to po4a::man it
       isn't needed anymore. That being said, if the source format of your documentation is POD,
       or XML, it may be clever to translate the source format and not this generated one. In
       most cases, po4a::man will detect generated pages and issue a warning. It will even refuse
       to process POD generated pages, because those pages are perfectly handled by po4a::pod,
       and because their nroff counterpart defines a lot of new macros I didn't want to write
       support for. On my box, 1432 of the 4323 pages are generated from POD and will be ignored
       by po4a::man.

       In most cases, po4a::man will detect the problem and refuse to process the page, issuing
       an adapted message. In some rare cases, the program will complete without warning, but the
       output will be wrong. Such cases are called "bugs" ;) If you encounter such case, be sure
       to report this, along with a fix when possible...

STATUS OF THIS MODULE

       This module can be used for most of the existing man pages.

       Some tests are regularly run on Linux boxes:

       •   one third of the pages are refused because they were generated from another format
           supported by po4a (e.g. POD or SGML).

       •   10% of the remaining pages are rejected with an error (e.g. a groff macro is not
           supported).

       •   Then, less than 1% of the pages are accepted silently by po4a, but with significant
           issues (i.e. missing words, or new words inserted)

       •   The other pages are usually handled without differences more important than spacing
           differences or line rewrapped (font issues in less than 10% of the processed pages).

SEE ALSO

       Locale::Po4a::Pod(3pm), Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm), po4a(7)

AUTHORS

        Denis Barbier <barbier@linuxfr.org>
        Nicolas Francois <nicolas.francois@centraliens.net>
        Martin Quinson (mquinson#debian.org)

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright 2002-2008 by SPI, inc.

       This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
       GPL (see the COPYING file).