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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: ppdtranslations.pot
From:       Heiko Evermann <Heiko.Evermann () gmx ! de>
Date:       2004-03-02 23:37:21
Message-ID: 40451AB1.6070609 () gmx ! de
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Hi Giole

>where is the script that creates ppdtranslations.pot?
>I'd like to hack it a bit to add support for filenames in comments and
>string aliasing, two simple features that could reduce translators work on
>that file of 50%/80%.
>
That would be a great idea. By the way: I do not even know what to do to 
get a dialog that uses any of this stuff. And it is really hard to 
translate.

After some digging in the vast ocean of files, I found:
/opt/kde3/kdebase/kdeprint/descriptions is the directory that does the 
trick.
Here the Makefile.am is the start. From this a "make -f Makefile.cvs" 
will generate Makefile.in and "configure" will generate "Makefile".

Have a look at Makefile.am: The process works in two steps:
1) generate a file "printers.cpp" with a lot of lines like
i18n("SomeString")
where "SomeString" is extracted from the files in /usr/share/cups/model. 
These end on ".ppd" and seem to contain property lists of printers. (I 
would really like to see where these strings get used in some KDE 
dialog, just to have a look at some strings and check whether the 
translation actually makes sense there.)
2) extract a pot-file from this dummy file, using --no-location as line 
numbers do not make so much sense here.

If you want to condense this file, you might try
"cat printers.cpp | sort | uniq > printers2.cpp" which throws away any 
duplicates. This reduces the string count from 3542 to 2874. As the 
current number of strings in ppdtranslation.pot is 2863, I assume that 
xgettext already does something like this. I assume that this would be 
listed in the usual comments ("printers.cpp:10; printers.cpp:200, etc.) 
but they are explicitly disabled.

Conclusion: I doubt that you could save the translators 50-80% of their 
work. I even doubt that there is any optimization potential here.

Translating ppdtranslations.pot is a very unrewarding job. I have 
started to hate this file a long time ago.

Kind regards,

Heiko Evermann

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