localized man pages

[Marc Fonvieille]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 11:51:20PM +0200, Gabor Kovesdan wrote:
> Marc Fonvieille escribió:
>> On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 12:37:49AM +0900, Hiroki Sato wrote:
>>   
>>> Gabor Kovesdan <gabor at freebsd.org> wrote
>>>   in <4721FFC5.9070505 at FreeBSD.org>:
>>> 
>>> ga> I have a volunteer, who is going to send me Hungarian man page
>>> ga> translations. I've noticed that Japanese people have some old 
>>> translated
>>> ga> man pages in the doc repository, but I'd rather commit the pages into
>>> ga> src so that we can have the appropriate versions for our branches in 
>>> the
>>> ga> future. I like the idea of making some progress about a more wide
>>> ga> language support by translating the manpages to Hungrian, so please 
>>> give
>>> ga> me an idea how I can do it in the src repo, where should they go.
>>> ga> (Ruslan, our mdoc guru is CC'd.)
>>> 
>>>  Before adding non-English manual page, we need i18n support of man,
>>>  nroff, and pager at least.  Japanese old manual pages depend on
>>>  Japanized tools such as japanese/man and japanese/groff (and not
>>>  actively maintained these days...).  It makes putting them into the
>>>  src tree difficult.
>>> 
>>>     
>> 
>> This is the reason why I stopped to add things to
>> doc/fr_FR.ISO8859-1/man, i.e, problematic toolchain.
>> 
>>   
>>>  Since groff's i18n support is still poor, I personally think we
>>>  should adopt UTF-8-capable toolchain if possible.  I have surveyed
>>>  such tools some time ago and found textproc/heirloom-doctools would
>>>  be a promising one.  It is from OpenSolaris (i.e. CDDL'd) and
>>>  supports UTF-8 output.  I am not sure compatibility of roff macro
>>>  between the groff and the heirloom-doctools, though.
>>> 
>>>     
>> 
>> What Linux people use on their various distributions?  Last time I
>> checked (well, it was in 99...) most of Linux distributions provided
>> localized manual pages.
>> 
>>   
> Ubuntu Linux uses groff 1.18.1 and has some Hungarian manual pages. I 
> succeeded to render them correctly by using "nroff -Tutf8 manpage", so we 
> must be able to do this with our groff 1.19.2, too. I'm not sure how to 
> adjust man(1) to do it automatically, though. Miklos, the guy, who 
> volunteered to do some translation work on the manpages also claimed that 
> he could see the translated manpages properly by using latin1 encoding 
> instead of ascii.
>

I used to use:
groff -man -mtty-char -Tlatin1 -dlang=fr.ISO8859-1 blahblah.1
which is still working.  Now I'm trying to recall why I really stopped
committing translated manual pages.  I remember I had a mail exchange
with Ruslan about the manual page system especially the mechanism
allowing the selection of the manual page to display according to the
locale.  I'm unable to find this mail, but I now think the problem was
on this point: our manual page system does not easily allow this
selection and the fall-back on the en_US version when the manual page is
not translated.  This should also work with ports manual pages.

-- 
Marc