Re: @dircategory (Re: Translating Emacs manuals is of strategic importance)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2024 04:40:41 +0000
> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
> Cc: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>, Vincent Belaïche 
> <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, Richard Stallman 
> <rms@gnu.org>, help-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> > I wasn't talking about the manuals.  But even for the manuals there
> > are some issues that need to be considered.  For example: what do we
> > do with the info/dir file for these translated manuals? what should be
> > @dircategory for them -- should it be a separate category, like
> > "Translated manuals", or should it be the same as in the original
> > English manuals?
> 
> 
> I suppose the @dircategory is also what appears in the Emacs info top 
> page under “*Menu:”?

The category headings there, yes.

> If that’s the case, what about using “Translated manuals” for now, 
> since the number of translated manuals is very low?

I'd say the other way around: as long as we have very few
translations, keeping them together with the English version is
better.

I wonder what Texinfo folks have to say about that.  Are there any
precedents for having such translations in DIR files?

> Other texinfo items that come to mind:
> 
> Would @author be also used for the translator?

@author is a TeX command and goes into the printed version.  For
translation, we'd need a separate directive, I think, since a
translator is not the author.  Again, this is something for the
Texinfo folks to handle.

> Also, we will have to translate @node, because they appear in the 
> Section index. I see that they were kept in English in the SES manual.

If we translate @node names, links from the doc strings and
cross-manual links will not work.  But, for such links to work, we
need a facility to tell the Info reader that when a link goes to a
manual named FOO.info, it should visit FOO-LANG.info instead.  Again,
something that involves a change in Texinfo and in all Info readers.