[dcplusplus-devel] help translation

[poy <po...@12...>]

regarding translation of the DC++ help;

DC++ uses HTML Help for its help system, which is a pretty good choice over 
the alternative (the old WinHelp). this means, of course, that it is formed 
by HTML files.

as for translation, the gettext library wasn't originally designed for HTML 
files; however, the po4a people <http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/> have 
written Perl scripts that extend the usage of gettext to a bunch of formats, 
including HTML.

i have committed some ground work to integrate po4a with our help; for now, 
only the first step is possible, which consists of generating a .pot 
template file using po4a-gettextize. it's about 300 KB, i've sent it on 
<http://www.sendspace.com/file/o0czzb>.
the next steps would be, if i understand the process correctly:
- to send that dcpp-help.pot (keep it that name, or call it something else?) 
file on Launchpad;
- to create wrappers around po4a-translate that create new HTML files based 
on translated .po files;
- to have the help SCons script copy these translated files in a temp 
directory, so it can build a translated compiled CHM file;
- to create wrappers around po4a-updatepo to update these .po files when our 
HTML files change.
i'd like to know if my thinking is correct before going further...

on po4a installation, i assume it is straight-forward on nix systems; i 
installed it on Windows using Cygwin, only had 1 change to do: had to 
replace all occurences of "::" by "." in po/pod.cfg.
i also added a few batch files in Cygwin/bin with the same names as the po4a 
programs (eg "po4a-gettextize.bat" for "po4a-gettextize"), so that they can 
be called from outside the Cygwin Shell, each batch file containing:
@echo off
bash --login -i -c "cd '%CD%'"
bash -c '%0 %*'
echo on

poy