We need to tie our software resource-strings ( e.g., the strings that contain the text used in dialogs, windows, etc.,) to our documentation but we can't use entities. Any suggestions?
The problem we discovered with entities is that our translation software is unable to display the entity values (unlike our XML authoring software-oXygen). So, our translators are forced to work with the entity names (e.g., &ml_oracle_driver; ) instead of the entity values (iAnywhere Solutions 12 - Oracle ODBC driver). As you can imagine, this severely limits the number of entities we can have in our documentation. Currently, we have about 14,000 instances in our collection that contain the text from our software-resource strings. These instances are currently tagged with a guilabel element. Also, our software resource-strings are available in an XML (XLIFF) file that we would love to be able to connect to our XML docs. An idea that we have been kicking around involves embedding the entity value (e.g, iAnywhere 12-Oracle ODBC driver) within the xml file (so that the translators can see the text). We were thinking about a solution that would work similar to how we use our olinks (except that it wouldn't create links in the output). This is currently how our olinks are processed: 1) We use xslt to build olink.db files for each of our books. 2) We author in oXygen, so we insert our olinks using an olink dialog that oXygen implemented for us. Our olink tags look like the following in our documentation: <olink targetdoc="dbadmin" targetptr="da-backup-dbs-5679299">Types of backup</olink>. 3) The contents of the olink tag (e.g.,Types of backup) are replaced during the xsltbuild; although, they are not updated in the xml files during the build. To update the files, we periodically run a refresh olink tool within oXygen. Our idea was to use the XLIFF file to create a .db file that could be used to insert olinks or xlinks in the XML files. The XSLT build would replace/update the software-resource-string text during the build. Has anyone done something like this? Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We are also wondering whether we should attempt such a solution with the olink element (with an attribute) or the xlink element. Thank you (again!), Kate .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Kate Wringe | Tech Writer 2| Sybase 445 Wes Graham Way, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6R2 Canada | Tel: (519) 883-6838 | kate.wri...@sybase.com | www.sybase.com
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