Internationalizes section handouts with Sphinx, reST, and gettext. #1
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For technical writing involving Python, RST is a neat choice, because it can be used by Sphinx to autogenerate files in a variety of output formats [1]. Moreover, it's the "fancy-Markdown" equivalent that has enough expressiveness to meaningfully work for technical writing, shoring up areas where Markdown itself fails to provide useful primitives (such as embedding images with set attributes). Section headings adhere to the same convention as Python's official docs [2]. [1]: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/index.html [2]: https://devguide.python.org/documenting/#sections
Sphinx [1] is "a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation." It also has great support for internationalization [2]. Sphinx is a common tool for writing about and documenting Python code, even used by the Python language itself. The TL;DR: of using Sphinx is: to make HTML documents, run `make html`. To make PDF documents, run `make latexpdf`. It's as easy as that! [1]: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/ [2]: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/advanced/intl.html
The index reST file current just contains a TOC containing all documents that look like "section*/section*". For more information on the `toctree` directive, see [1]. [1]: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/1.8/usage/restructuredtext/directives.html#directive-toctree
With this commit, the power of Sphinx's gettext integration begins to shine.
Translators (or in this case, just me) populate `.po` files autogenerated by
`sphinx-intl`, and then Sphinx can build documentation in any of those
languages.
To extract translatable messages into `pot` files, use:
$ make gettext
These `pot` files are just generated by Sphinx and are kept out of version
control.
To generate `po` files from the `pot` files created by the previous step, use:
$ sphinx-intl update -p _build/gettext -l es -l de -l fr
Any valid language codes can be used in that command.
Later, when the content of the translatable strings change, you'll have to run:
$ sphinx-intl update -p _build/gettext
This will update the `po` files with the new strings for translators.
Finally, to make the documentation in a specific language (say, Spanish), use:
$ make -e SPHINXOPTS="-D language='es'" html
$ make -e SPHINXOPTS="-D language='es'" latexpdf
That's somewhat hard to remember, so on its way is a helpful script.
The `makedoc.sh` script will make HTML and PDF versions of the handouts in all languages it knows about and store the output in `handouts-html` and `handouts-pdf`. It's a pretty janky script though, so manually check the output before committing. The README contains instructions for handling translations and building to multiple languages.
The PDFs can be found at: * `handouts-pdf/de/Section1.pdf` * `handouts-pdf/en/Section1.pdf` * `handouts-pdf/es/Section1.pdf` * `handouts-pdf/fr/Section1.pdf` The HTML files can be found at: * handouts-html/de/html/section1/section1.html * handouts-html/en/html/section1/section1.html * handouts-html/es/html/section1/section1.html * handouts-html/fr/html/section1/section1.html Admittedly, there's a lot of HTML garbage floating around and it would be nice to find a way to clean that all up.
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Overview
This PR inserts the Sphinx documentation tool, and its friends, to autogenerate HTML and PDF handouts in multiple languages.
Changes Proposed
At a more detailed level, what changes does this PR make to the codebase?
gettext-friendly.pofiles, which could eventually be integrated with a public-facing crowd-sourcing translation service like Transifex or CrowdIn.Caveats
Mentions
@brahmcapoor