Re: [Freecats-Dev] Radio silence

[Yves Champollion]

> From: "Kirk McElhearn" <address@hidden>


> On 5/8/03 21:54, "Yves Champollion" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > 2. Has OO's macro language what it takes? (you may criticize MS-VBA's
so-so
> > reliability but I have heard hair-raising reports from people having
> > seriously tried to write anything with OO's macro language). But, I'm
> > willing to try, yes.
>
> If it doesn't, is there any way to hook into the underlying Unix base
behind
> OO? (Though this would only work on Unix, Linux or Mac OS X, and not on
> windows...) I would think it's pretty easy (relatively) to write a
segmenter
> using grep, sed and other tools...

If you don't have your segmenter atop a word processor, then you have to
create your own editor and go the DéjàVu/Transit way. You have to reinvent
the wheel in many ways (a word processor has all the gimmicks a professional
writer wants, and translators are writers. They want boomarkability, fonts,
shortcuts, spellchecking, thesaurus, drag-and-drop, unlimited undos,
Autocorrect, smart cut and paste, real clipboards, WYSIWIG, print preview,
you name it).

The one immense advantage of OO is its XML format. It's feasible to see an
extractor that takes the translatable parts out of XML documents, presents
them for translation in a spartan, DejaVu-like editor. It boils down to
rebuilding DV in a platform-independent compiler (C? Java?) and having it
equipped with just an XML filter, opening the door to all OO documents. BUT,
you do away with OO's sexy interface, you're left with a text-only window
with all these ugly tags :-(

Or perhaps I don't get it right. What do you mean by "hook into the
underlying Unix base behind OO?". My linux is *very* limited. Perhaps
there's a whole world out there I'm missing

yves