Hi Shaun,

Shaun McCance <[email protected]> schrieb am Fr., 11. Jan. 2019, 16:05:

> Hi Mario,
>
> On Fri, 2018-12-28 at 22:35 +0100, Mario Blättermann wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > the Glabels project [1], which resides in the Gnome Git repository
> > for
> > years, is currently to be ported to Qt5 [2]. Because the user
> > interface is similar to the old GTK one, we want to reuse the
> > existing
> > user manual (at least partially). So Glabels-qt could become the
> > first
> > Qt project which uses Mallard as source for the user manual. Luckily,
> > neither itstool nor yelp-tools seem to have any hard GTK/Gnome
> > dependencies, which makes it much easier for a pure Qt project.
>
> Awesome. It was definitely intentional to make those tools independant
> so they can be widely used. I know itstool is used quite a bit outside
> of GNOME, but yelp-xsl/yelp-tools not as much.
>
> > Besides that, we want to reuse and extend the existing manpages.
> > Groff
> > itself is not very attractive, so we are looking for a simpler way.
> > Markdown came closer, but it seems to be no more than a "poor man's
> > XML" and almost unusable regarding i18n. Docbook is too complicated
> > in
> > comparison with Mallard, so the latter could be the less painful way,
> > if possible. Would be nice if we had the same syntax for both user
> > manual and traditional man pages, wouldn't it? Moreover, we can use
> > the mentioned itstool/yelp-tools for both without bothering with
> > different tools.
> >
> > Essentially, we need a proper way to convert Mallard to Groff, using
> > an appropriate stylesheet. Any help would be very appreciated.
>
> I'm afraid I don't have anything already made for that. Based on my
> experience from writing (then rewriting) the man parser in Yelp, I
> think a 90% solution for converting TO roff from Mallard would be a
> weekend job. Then there would be a very long tail of corner cases. I
> might be able to throw a weekend at it after I get Mallard 1.1 out.


thanks for your answer and sorry for the extremely delayed replay.
Unfortunately, Jim Evins (the maintainer of Glabels) has decided to switch
from Mallard to Python Sphinx in the meantime. Admittedly, I'm not very
happy with his choice, but he's the boss, and my knowledge about things
like build system integration and format converters is quite poor...

Anyway, it would be fine to have a converter from Mallard to Groff. Then
the existing man pages in Gnome applications (even those which are only
available in Debian packages due to Debian's man page policy) could be
converted to Mallard and integrated into the po file of the user manual.
This way the doc translators don't have to think about whether they give
man page translations a priority, they would have the appropriate gettext
messages in the same file anyway. Moreover, nobody has to bother with
changes in Damned Lies, for example additional lists for man pages.

Besides the converter itself, there's some yelp-tools magic needed to
separate user manual and Groff stuff during the build process and
installation.

Best Regards,
Mario
_______________________________________________
gnome-doc-list mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list

Reply via email to