#116 Double Lang Manual

[Andrzej Pruszynski]

I think it would be great to have a double language manual. More convenient for translating the FMS and easy switching to English commands for kids.

[David Costanzo]

Since translating a manual is so much work, I've always left it up to each translator how much they wanted to do. Most (quite understandably) do nothing, and for these I use the English manual and append some tables to the end for translating to and from English command names. These manuals are updated as I make changes to the English manual. Two translators have provided me with a replacement manual in .CHM format. For these, it's up to a community of volunteers to keep them up-to-date. So far, no one has translated the DocBook XML.

Having a Polish-English dual language manual, from my point of view, is no different than any of the above. As the translator for Polish, you can decide what kind of manual you want to provide and if a dual-language manual is what you want, so be it. The English manual is written in DocBook and I use the standard DocBook templates to transform it into HTML. I don't know how to make them do a side-by-side rendering as shown in your picture, so you'd have to figure that and send me instructions if you wanted to use DocBook for your manual. Or you can abandon DocBook completely and create a English-Polish manual CHM using whatever tools make a side-by-side rendering easy.