Translating the Gramps User manual

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Revision as of 23:11, 30 September 2011 by Daleathan (talk | contribs)
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An explaination of how you can translate the GRAMPS manual. This manual is also available from within GRAMPS using the F1 key (which opens this manual in a browser window), or from the help menu.

Getting started

Translating GRAMPS' documentation into a new language is a long, tedious, and boring process, just like with any complex text :-) Since version 3.0 the documentation is completely inside this wiki. So you don't need to use or even install fancy applications to help us. You can use your browser and start immediately. Just go to the User Manual page, click on your language. You should could keep the english manual open to check if there is a help page missing. The general wiki help page will help you editing wiki pages. This wiki uses the MediaWiki software, which is the same that is used by Wikipedia, so it could feel familiar.

Translating

  • Figures: localized screenshots are nice in the localized manual
    • If you can provide figures on your own this is great. Upload them to this wiki with the following naming convention: figure_name_zz.png (zz is your language code). If the figure is language independent just call it figure_name.png.
    • A command to take screenshots that works for me, is by using imagemagick (should be installed with every linux distribution, if not, get it):
      import -quality 100 -trim -delay 200 -resize 500 -density 100x100 -frame -channel RGB -depth 8 screenshot.png 
      This creates a fully compressed (-quality 100), timed screenshot after 2 seconds (-delay 200) of size 500 pixels wide (-resize 500), with resolution 100 (-density 100x100), with the window frame attached (-frame) in RGB mode (-channel RGB) and bbp 24 (-depth 8). This creates images of 5 inches wide, which fit nicely on a book page, as well as on a HTML page.
    • If it's too much trouble for you, just let us know and perhaps somebody else will do it for you. Fortunately, one does not have to speak the language to make screenshots :-)
    • For maintenance, it could be more easy to follow a naming scheme :
      • filename-{gramps version number}-{locale}.png
        Mainwin-31-mk.png
      • filename_{gramps version number}_{locale}.png
        Mainwin_31_mk.png

Links to wiki manual

To have the link working in GRAMPS, you need to have or edit the GrampsDisplay.py file to contain your language. On line 30 of that file, you see:

MANUALS = {
   'nl' : '/nl',
}

This maps a language code to the extension used on the wiki, so to add french, change this too:

MANUALS = {
   'nl' : '/nl',
   'fr':  '/fr',
}
  • Every 'manual|...' entry in the gramp.pot file refers to a section in the manual, so make sure to use good section headings so this does not change too much over time.

Note that reports/tools link to a section in the page with the same name as the report name in GRAMPS.

  • You should be able to edit directly on wiki or using tools like txt2po. Also previous gettext file for the manual and Translation Memory may help you to upgrade deprecated/old gettext files.