Hi TeXinfo maintainers,

This exchange is from the French translators mailing list:

Jean-Charles Malahieude wrote:

Le 28/10/2022 à 19:42, Gavin Smith a écrit :

...

In the translations for 'texinfo_document', fr.po:

[...] #: tp/Texinfo/Transformations.pm:597 msgid " --- The Detailed Node Listing ---" msgstr " --- Liste d@'etaill@'ee des n@oeuds ---"

I believe n@oeuds should be n@oe{}uds as otherwise there is an error about an unknown command @oeuds.

I will not edit the file myself and wait for it to be updated.

New and corrected file uploaded to the FTP and accepted.

Cheers,

Jean-Charles

It sounds wrong to expect translators to use TeXinfo syntax for non-ASCII characters, for three reasons:

1) Translator tools support the common (state-free) charset encodings, namely UTF-8, ISO-8859-*, and so on. Not TeX with , not TeXinfo with @, not ISO-2022-*. PO files that expect TeXinfo syntax deny translators from the ability to use their native input methods.

I guess this is the reason why you don't see Chinese, Hindi, Vietnamese, Armenian, etc. translations for texinfo/po_document/*.po.

2) Even for translators who are familiar with the TeXinfo syntax, the TeXinfo syntax allows for mistakes like the one reported above, that could not happen if UTF-8 was used for the encoding, in the translator's workflow.

3) This syntax reduces the functionality available in msgfmt. For example, in pt_BR.po there is the message

#: tp/Texinfo/Convert/DocBook.pm:1088 #, perl-brace-format msgid "see section ``{section_name}'' in @cite{{book}}" msgstr "veja se@,{c}@~{a}o ``{section_name}'' em @cite{{book}}"

If this message was being checked by 'msgfmt -c', it would report an error, because the translation has more variables ({c}, {a}, {section_name}, {book}) than the msgid. Thus I conclude that you have not enabled the '-c' option of msgfmt, and thus the — would-be useful — perl-brace-format argument checking does not happen.

I would strongly suggest to request UTF-8 encoded PO files from the translators and convert them to TeXinfo syntax inside the TeXinfo build system.

Bruno