From: Pavel C. <pc...@ib...> - 2010-01-24 17:56:54
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Paul Vinkenoog napsal(a): > Pavel Cisar wrote: > >> It's just about what chapters would get translated and what would be >> translated first. Obviously, the LangRef chapter(s) are best choice >> for first target, as it would complete the LangRef. > > I agree. > >>> btw. Pavel, what format is your book done in? >>> (not that it's important at this point - we will need to "DocBookify" >>> it anyway; i am willing to help with that, and merging in the LangRef >>> updates.) >> They're in MS Word 2000, but could be easily converted to OOo thought. > > In the past, the DocBook XML produced by OO has been pretty useless for > our purposes. But we can see about that when we get to work. Since you > have the Word sources, could you mail them to me or place them on the > site somewhere so we can have a look at the structure? Most of us don't > understand Czech, but at least this'll give us an idea of the size of > the different chapters, and how the reference sections are built up. I'll dig it up and send it to you privately. > Another important matter is copyrights. Did you write the reference > sections from scratch, or were they more or less copied from the > Borland docs (or the IBPhoenix RefGuide)? That really depends on how you'll look at it. The original langref was definitely used as one source of information and I copied its base structure (layout) to great extent, but I wrote my own langref from scratch. However, they resemble a lot, because there is no way how to be very creative with language reference. There must be statement definition in commonly used format, a table of important clauses with their brief description, a summary what the command do, detailed explanation of important clauses and operations, maybe an important note or two, and an example (or several). The information present in original and my own langref have much in common (how it could be different?). Some examples are the same (based on "employee" database), but many are completely new. I was also constrained by number of pages I've got for this, so the text is as much dense as possible and some information pieces are so short, that there is no way how you can escape the very close similarity, and in some cases the wording is almost the same. For example, how you can write next information that describe details for ALTER DOMAIN command in three dense paragraphs that they would be completely different than original ones: "ALTER DOMAIN changes any aspect of an existing domain except its NOT NULL setting. Changes made to a domain definition affect all column definitions based on the domain that have not been overridden at the table level. To change the NOT NULL setting of a domain, drop the domain and create it with the desired combination of features. The TYPE clause of ALTER DOMAIN does not allow you to make datatype conversions that could lead to data loss.". My own take when (translated back to english) was: "ALTER DOMAIN changes any part of domain definition except NOT NULL. Change in domain definition will be propagated to all columns based on domain, if these properties were not changed at table level in column definition. It's necessary to drop a domain and create it with new definition to change the NOT NULL setting. The TYPE clause doesn't allow to do any conversion that would cause a data loss." As you can see, they're quite similar. And there are many such cases, notably for small commands like ALTER DOMAIN. I guess that they could be even identical at few places. The reasons for that are: the text is very dense, it shares the basic structure (the most significant source of resemblance) with original langref, and original langref was used as one from information sources. I don't know how much problem it is, but I'm sure it could be handled on translation and final edit. best regards Pavel Cisar |