Introduction to Po4a

The po4a (PO for anything) project goal is to ease translations (and more interestingly, the maintenance of translations) using gettext tools on areas where they were not expected like documentation.

In po4a each documentation format is handled by a module. For now, we have a module for the following formats:

asciidoc: AsciiDoc format.
dia: uncompressed Dia diagrams.
docbook: DocBook XML.
guide: Gentoo Linux's XML documentation format.
ini: INI format.
kernelhelp: Help messages of each kernel compilation option.
latex: LaTeX format.
man: Good old manual page format.
pod: Perl Online Documentation format.
sgml: either DebianDoc or DocBook DTD.
texinfo: The info page format.
tex: generic TeX documents (see also latex).
text: simple text document.
wml: WML documents.
xhtml: XHTML documents.
xml: generic XML documents (see also docbook).
yaml: YAML documents.

Installation

To install this module type the following:

   perl Build.PL
   ./Build
   ./Build install

Contributing

po4a is particularly welcoming contributions from the community. If you are new to Open Source, we'd love to mentor you for your first contributions. Please see the CONTRIBUTING file to see how you could help.

Use without installation

If you want to use a version without installing it (e.g. directly from the git tree), use the PERLLIB environment variable as such:

   PERLLIB=~/git-checkouts/po4a/lib ~/git-checkouts/po4a/po4a-gettextize [usual args]

Po4a dependencies

Locale::gettext (v1.01)

This module being itself internationalized, it needs the Locale::gettext library to translate its own messages. If it is not present, then po4a's messages won't be translated, but po4a will remain fully functional.
Text::WrapI18N

This module is used to format po4a's warnings and error messages. It permits to wrap long error messages without splitting words. If it is not present, the formatting of messages will be different, but po4a will remain fully functional.
Term::ReadKey

This module is used to retrieve the terminal's line width. It is not used if Text::WrapI18N is not available. If it is not present, the line width can be specified with the COLUMN environment variable.

SGML module specific dependencies

SGMLS (1.03ii)

This is a set of Perl5 routines for processing the output from the onsgmls SGML parser.
opensp (1.5.2) OpenJade group's SGML parsing tools

This is the SGML parser we use.

Text module specific dependencies

Unicode::GCString

This module is used to compute text width; it is needed by AsciiDoc to determine two line titles in encodings different from ASCII. https://github.com/hatukanezumi/Unicode-LineBreak

YAML module specific dependencies

YAML::Tiny

This module is used to parse and serialize the YAML file.

Project hosting

Webpage: https://po4a.org
Source code: https://github.com/mquinson/po4a
Bug tracker: https://github.com/mquinson/po4a/issues
Source of the web pages: https://github.com/mquinson/po4a-website

Copyright and license

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of GPL (see COPYING file).

Authors:

Denis Barbier barbier@linuxfr.org
Martin Quinson (mquinson#debian.org)

cocoatomo/po4a