Allin, Conditioning the choice of the language on the IP address is problematic in the sense that there may be people in an English-speaking country who would prefer to have a non-English documentation. Or you may have people in a Spanish-speaking country that would prefer an English documentation ...
For a Windows system you can play a bit with the installer, by adding a step where the user has to choose the documentation. The chosen documentation would then be downloaded and added to the gretl installation. Moreover, those who want could then download the documentation in several languages. Unfortunately, this is Windows-only and I don't know if this is possible for Linux or Mac. Yet another possibility would be to choose a default format for the documentation, like e.g. English (US letter paper). Then you could mention somewhere that the documentation is available in other formats, together with a description of how to get it and where to install it. Now, I am not a programmer, but I suppose it should not be that hard to write a routine that automates all this: downloading the desired file(s) and copying it to the local gretl installation. Then, the end-user will only have to hit a button in the "Help" menu and select his preferred version. Another advantage of such a solution would be that the documentation can be updated independently from the program. I understand perfectly that this requires adding a feature to gretl. However, I believe that such a feature is much less of a bloat than adding tons and tons of documents that a particular user won't (can't) read anyway. Best wishes, jean On 11/21/05, Allin Cottrell <cottrell(a)wfu.edu> wrote: > We've now (at least temporarily) standardized on PDF and plain text > as the primary formats for the gretl manual (we can make both win32 > compiled HTML and gnome HTML/XML, but these formats are were never > properly integrated in terms of searchability and contextualization, > and I really don't have time to work seriously on that). > > So I'm now thinking it would be a good idea to distribute the PDF > manual files with gretl. The only problem is that we have four > variants of these files: > > * English (US letter paper) > * English (A4 paper) > * Italian (A4) > * Spanish (A4) > > I think it would be "bloat" to distribute all of these files with > the gretl package for Windows and the gretl source package (or the > rpm). We're talking about approximately 1 MB per variant. So I'm > looking for clever suggestions. One thought that occurred to me is > to have a "PDF server" (either at Wake Forest University or at > Sourceforge), which would check the IP address of a gretl > installation requesting the manual and try to determine which > variant was most appropriate. Then we could do one download, after > which the relevant manual files would be on the local computer. > > Any ideas, either (a) on how exactly to implement the above, or (b) > in the form of better proposals? > > Allin Cottrell > > _______________________________________________ > Gretl-users mailing list > Gretl-users(a)ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu > http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-users >
