[PlanetCCRMA] Any Spanish-speaking Planet CCRMA users out there?

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2004-09-28 at 08:30, hpsilva@servidor.unam.mx wrote:
> I was wondering if there are any Spanish-speaking or more especifically 
> mexican users of Planet CCRMA lurking around here... I want to ask the 
> list if there is at all any interest in cooperating on a translation of 
> the software to Spanish. I would like to do this for our classes here in 
> Mexico City, as I feel learning is always easier in your native language 
> and this could give a boost to free software for music in our countries.

It would be very interesting to do that (and also do something about
French, there was an initiative a while back). I'm all for it. 

This is what I had in mind... (I've been rumiating about this for a
while). 

The source to the Planet CCRMA web pages is written in latex. Latex has
the advantage of being a "language" in the sense that I can define
commands that help me automate many parts of the page creation
process[*]. Anything automatic is good. When I want to update the site I
just run the latex file through latex2html and copy the resulting web
pages to their final location. This approach has the advantage of being
very simple and very time efficient (for me - and that is very important
:-). 

BTW, I would prefer to keep latex (or something very similar that is
completely text based and programmable) in place as the main source for
the web site. "Click-based" editing and interfacing is not really an
option as it is more labor intensive. 

So the question is, how do we translate this (latex based source), and
more important, how do we maintain the translations current and
synchronized?

One way would be to include the translations in the same source tree,
probably having paragraph by paragraph translations. For example (just
making up the syntax right now):

\begin{language}
\english
 some text and latex commands
\spanish
 same text in spanish
\end{language}

(latex tags start with "\")
and so on and so forth. 

So, two runs of latex2html would create two different versions of the
web pages (the tags inside the language block would work as if's), one
for each language. If a translation for a given paragraph does not exist
the english version would be inserted as a default (till that paragraph
is translated, after that the spanish version would be used). That would
enable to have different languages up and running very fast, with a
partial translation that would expand as translators add stuff to the
source. 

If a change is made in the master ("english") language, then that block
would be marked "\obsolete" or something like that, and english would be
used again for that paragraph until the spanish (or whatever)
translation catches up. Or the spanish would be marked visibly as
obsolete and a link provided to the newer english version. Anything is
possible as this is all text. 

This could all reside in cvs or subversion, of course. 

As to the implementation, as usual the devil is in the details. The main
problem facing this approach is that latex2html does not support the
latex \if conditionals. About a year ago, with this problem in mind, I
tested other latex -> html translators and one of them (hevea, I seem to
remember) did have the required support. But the visual quality of the
generated html was not really satisfying (ie: it looked ugly on a
browser). 

My current thinking was to implement a very simple "preprocessor"
program that would process \if commands (or whatever is used in the
end). So, running the latex source through the preprocessor for each
language would create vanilla (no \if's) latex that latex2html can
handle, with the proper mix of spanish and english, depending on which
parts of the site have already been translated (and/or are in sync with
the master english version). 

Thoughts?
-- Fernando

[*] This is what the entry for freqtweak looks like:

\newcommand{\freqtweakver}{0.6.1-1}
\newcommand{\freqtweakurl}{http://freqtweak.sourceforge.net/}
\subsubsection{\label{freqtweak} \urllink {Freqtweak} {\freqtweakurl}}
{\bf Version \freqtweakver\ \RHFCALL\ \JACK}

\begin{quote}
``FreqTweak is a tool for FFT-based realtime audio spectral
manipulation and display. It provides several algorithms for
processing audio data in the frequency domain and a highly interactive
GUI to manipulate the associated filters for each. It also provides
high-resolution spectral displays in the form of scrolling-raster
spectragrams and energy vs frequency plots displaying both pre- and
post-processed spectra.''
\end{quote}

To install type:

\begingreyfont
\texttt{apt-get install freqtweak}\\
\endgreyfont

Freqtweak works through \htmlref {Jack} {jack} so you have to start it
to make things happen.

\textbf{ManPages:} \manpage {freqtweak} {1}

\textbf{Rpms:}

\beginsmallfont
\begin{description}
\item[\linkBaseAll{freqtweak}{\freqtweakver}]
\item[\linkDebugAll{freqtweak}{\freqtweakver}]
\item[\linkSourceAll{freqtweak}{\freqtweakver}]
\end{description}
\endsmallfont