Re: Japanese translations

[Sawada , Yoshiki]

Hello Carl,

Carl D. Sorensen <c_sorensen <at> byu.edu> wrote:

> I found a place in ja/user/fundamentals.itely where a line ended in @c <at> c,
> which caused make web to fail.  I fixed it and pushed a patch to git, so
> it's taken care of now.

Thank you for your pointing my mistake. Thanks to you, I got the opportunity
to check all of my TexInfo files. 

> But I was curious that you ended each line of the japanese translation with
> @c, presumably so that you would prevent your editor from joining the line
> with the next line.
> 
> Is this necessary in Japanese?  It's not done in any other language, and if
> it's possible to avoid it, I think it would be better practice.  Havina an
> @c at the end of each line makes it harder to edit, in general.
> 
> I'm only a tiny bit literate in Japanese, so maybe there's something that I
> don't know about that requires @c at the end of each line.

The reason to put @c at the end of each line is because a line break in
a TexInfo file produces a white space in its document and Japanese texts
usually do not use any white space. @c at the end of line prevents texi2html
from converting it's line break to a white space.

I think Japanese text with needless white spaces looks ugly and is hard
to read. But other Japanese may not pay any attention for it. In fact,
the previous Japanese translator for LilyPond (Ishizaki-san) put
line breaks into HTML files without any care.

Before, I entered a paragraph into a line of a TexInfo file not to produce
needless white spaces. But, because the patch generated from it is hard
to read, I now often put line breaks with "@c"s.

I think there are three choices which we should select to treat Japanese text.

1. Put line breaks with "@c"s into TexInfo files. The advantage of this method
  is generated documents look good and their TexInfo sources do not look
  so bad. The disadvantage is they make their TexInfo codes harder to edit
  as you said.

2. Put a paragraph into a line of TexInfo file. Documents generated by this
  method look good, but their TexInfo sources are hard to read.

3. Put line breaks without any "@c" into TexInfo files. TexInfo files are easy
  to read and edit, but documents generated from them look a little bad.

Of course, I think choice 1 is best. But if I should take choice 3, it is better
to put line breaks immediately after commas or periods when I can.
(They are "、" and "。" respectively in Japanese.)

Thanks,

Yoshiki