Re: [Tails-l10n] Dropping CSS formating for GUI documentatio…

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Author: Muri Nicanor
Date:  
To: Tails localization discussion, sajolida, Cody Brownstein
New-Topics: Re: [Tails-l10n] Dropping CSS formating for GUI documentation
Subject: Re: [Tails-l10n] Dropping CSS formating for GUI documentation
Hi sajolida, hi Cody,

On 09/09/2018 03:31 PM, sajolida wrote:
> Hi translators!
>
> I'm putting my tech writing colleague Cody in copy.
>

[...]>
> Only some days ago did I realize that this might be a real pain for
> translators to translate and maintain. Of course, you've been dealing
> with that for years and already know how to do it well, but what about
> newer translators and future teams?
>
> I haven't done much translations myself and I've never used Weblate, so
> I'd like to know how much of a relief it would be if we stopped writing
> this way and used Markdown instead.


I have some experience with html, so for me its not that hard to parse
those, but i can see how it might lead to confusion and/or mistakes and
changing it to pure markdown would definitly make it easier to read. How
hard it is also depends on the strings before and after the
application-span.
I think that changing it to pure markdown would definitly be an improvement.
Maybe i'm wrong, but isn't it also possible to use custom html
attributes nowadays? Something like
<application>Tails Installer</application>
would (imo) also be an improvement and would not have the downside of
losing the 'styleability'.

> For example:
>
> - <span class="application">Tails Installer</span>
>
> Would become:
>
> - *Tails Installer*
>
> I'm also interested in:
>
> - Whether it depends on your translation tools, for example, if PO Edit
> is affected in the same way as Weblate. They might be easier to
> translate on some tool than other or some tools might detect broken
> HTML.

I haven't used weblate that much, so i'm not sure if its easier or
harder. At least in vim and poedit it doesn't make a difference. Poedit
allows to just copy the source string using a Ctrl+b and then modify it
and i see that weblate does the same with Ctrl+o- this make it easier,
because you can just ignore the html part (you don't have to copy it by
hand) and concentrate on the content.

> - Hearing from how do this goes for the less technical of our
> translators. Say someone who doesn't otherwise know HTML. How frequent
> is it for newer translators to made mistakes on these?
>
> - Whether you think that Markdown instead of HTML would lower the error
> rates. Because I still want application names to display in italic :)


are there even errors with html? i can not recall any...

maybe a bit off topic, but for me the hardest to read are string like:
[[!meta title="Other Linux (Red Hat, Fedora, etc.)"]] [[!meta
robots="noindex"]] [[!meta stylesheet="bootstrap.min" rel="stylesheet"
title=""]] [[!meta stylesheet="inc/stylesheets/assistant"
rel="stylesheet" title=""]] [[!meta stylesheet="inc/stylesheets/linux"
rel="stylesheet" title=""]]

cheers,
muri