Introduction to Po4a
====================

The po4a (PO for anything) project goal is to ease translations (and
more interestingly, the maintenance of translations) using gettext
tools on areas where they were not expected like documentation.

In po4a each documentation format is handled by a module. For now, we have a
module for the POD format (in which the perl documentation is written), the
good old man pages, and the documentation of the kernel compilation options.
Some other modules are underway, like for sgml, xml or texinfo.


INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

   perl Build.PL
   ./Build
   ./Build install


USE WITHOUT INSTALLATION

If you want to use a version without installing it (such as the CVS one),
use the PERLLIB environment variable is such construction:
 
  PERLLIB=~/svn-checkouts/po4a/lib ~/svn-checkouts/po4a/po4a-gettextize [usual args]


PO4A DEPENDENCIES

  Locale::gettext (v1.01): 
    This module being itself internationalized, it needs the Locale::gettext
    library to translate its own messages.
    If it is not present, then po4a's messages won't be translated, but
    po4a will remain fully functional.

  Text::WrapI18N:
    This module is used to format po4a's warnings and error messages.  It
    permits to wrap long error messages without splitting words.
    If it is not present, the formatting of messages will be different,
    but po4a will remain fully functional.

  Term::ReadKey:
    This module is used to retrieve the terminal's line width.  It is not
    used if Text::WrapI18N is not available.
    If it is not present, the line width can be specified with the COLUMN
    environment variable.


SGML MODULE SPECIFIC DEPENDENCIES

  SGMLS (1.03ii):
    This is a set of Perl5 routines for processing the output from the sgmls
    and nsgmls SGML parsers.
 
  sp (1.3.4): James Clark's SGML parsing tools
    This is the parser we use.
    http://www.jclark.com/sp/


TEXT MODULE SPECIFIC DEPENDENCIES

  Unicode::GCString:
    This module is used to compute text width; it is needed by AsciiDoc to
    determine two line titles in encodings different from ASCII.
    http://hatuka.nezumi.nu/repos/Unicode-LineBreak/


PROJECT WEB PAGE

You can find more information and report bugs at the po4a project web page:

  http://po4a.alioth.debian.org


COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of GPL (see COPYING file).
       
Copyright (C) 2002-2O12 by SPI, inc.
Authors:
        Denis Barbier <barbier@linuxfr.org>
        Martin Quinson (mquinson#debian.org)

