John Devereux wrote:
First thing to remember is that I started the ConTeXt project many years (5???) ago and the program *and* its documentation have evolved a lot since then.
Is there anything in particular new that you think might help?
Compared with the situation a few years back, WinConTeXt MkIV is a breeze to install and update. And it works without fiddling, no font installation, no funny coding in the format file, nothing. Even the Cyrillic version worked when I just got the file encoding correct. Even if they'll never compile the file, installing WinConTeXt is probably the easiest way to get SciTe with correct syntax highlighting. Except that you need to set UTF8 as default by yourself and not all users can get that far; the more patient ones will, though, if instructions are clear (go to menu x, click on y, write or copy to the file exactly the following line, save, close SciTe, reopen.) Daydreaming towards off-topic direction: This would actually be really handy for people who need to edit .tex but never compile: a download-and-click-to-install SciTecumConTeXt package that had .tex defaulted to ConTeXt and had appropriate highlighting, but nothing else. Encoding could probably also be defaulted to UTF8 at this point or the installation could ask whether encoding is Windows standard or UTF and then put the default in as needed. If such a package existed, I could just dump the installation package and the files to be edited on a USB stick or CD and (snail)mail the whole thing to the person doing the translation. Most Windows users can handle the installation bit, if it is like installing for example Adobe Acrobat Reader. I.e. I'm looking for something like the Notepad related free/shareware html editors that highlight but don't have much brain otherwise - while I use SciTe for my html work, my colleague has been happy with Notepad-something-or-other (and that finally rescued me and our code from the clutches of FrontPage).
2 out of 7 is not what I was hoping for... I assume these were your agents or similar (rather than "professional" translators)? If so that is how we were hoping to do it too.
Correct. One of those two has some background in programming, so he even managed the first chapter with Notepad (or something similar), also he whined that it was difficult without highlighting. The other one was an elderly consultant who may have dealt with computers in the time when text editing/layouting still involved similar coding. Or then he was just used to taking on any job that falls his way, at least he managed beautifully. All or most of the others are marketing people who take one look at the editing instructions and give up. This happened even in-house where I would have been easy to reach for any help and even offered to install the system on his computer. No hope (I was reasonably annoyed with this one, cutting-and-pasting that language took me like three weeks...). The funniest (but sad) thing is that after they give up on .tex, I also offer to convert the graphics into formats that will be easy to insert into Word if they want to do a translation of their own, but they've *never* taken me up on that offer yet. Instead they apparently just cut and paste the graphics from our official pdf and the result is usually not as good quality as it would have been with the stuff I send. The one I'm now working on is pretty .... sad. Although not as sad as the 20 meg version I received a year earlier that had tracking on, too (thankfully Word2007 now has an easy cleaning function with which I got rid of the 10 megs of revisions).
I was going to try saving the tex original as .doc - word seems to open it OK - and then saving *their* end product as "encoded text/UTF8". Has anyone tried this?
I think I tried this with the Russian test file and it worked, but I can retry (I've got Word 2003). The very important bit is to choose "encoded text" as save format - it allows you to do plain text + UTF8, but the file just isn't saved as UTF8 (confusing or what????). Been there, done that.... Also, the tip I got here for a character converter, charsc, was pretty good. Can't quite figure out the command line version, but I can get it to work if I know the original encoding (it couldn't guess at Windows-Cyrillic, IsoLatin1 went better). It is downloadable at http://www.kalytta.com/tools.php. Also, a caveat about Word. As my editing instructions say, you really have to have all AutoXxx features turned off or your tex code can get pretty fishy. In the worst case the autocorrect features do things to your parentheses and even in the best case you get to fight with things like ... turning into real ellipsis and possibly getting mussed up later in conversion. If you can talk your translators into using WordPad instead (if they are not up to trying SciTe), it will make your life easier in the long run. *you* can still open the resulting .rtf file in Word and convert it into UTF8 as long as your Word has been tamed. Also, when you try to compile the translated file, expect to get stuck at any % or & that are in the running text. They never remember to put that backslash in front of these...
I was going to have a single environment file, which the translators never see, then a *single* document file. But perhaps separate chapters would be better... My document is not so big, maybe 30 pages of text (plenty of screen captures too). So perhaps my document is like one of your chapters. But there could be several other documents in the pipeline, so am trying to come up with a workable approach.
We have another, 30 page manual, that was done after the big one (which wasn't quite so big then, we started with three models...), but it has the same type of division. I just find it much easier to find the stuff to be fixed when the file lenght is limited. And the graphics take space in the code, too, sometimes almost as much as on the page in reality (if they are smallish). Besides, when I check the files in before leaving work, the names of the files jog my memory about what changes I made and thus the version control log becomes more accurate. (Instead of just changing manual.tex I change intro.tex and sensorspecs.tex and ethernet.tex and all of these get flagged when checking files back in.) And in case of gigantic messup I can just revert the file for that chapter and lose those changes, but everything else I did the same day is safe. Been there, done that too.... The longer the individual file is, the more you have to lose if things go wrong.
I think I can do everything with one environment file and some modes. I also have a similarly functioning layout in mind to avoid duplication of common images, with fallbacks and so forth.
If I started now, I'd use modes, too. I once tried, but didn't understand enough to really get it to work and then the manual was already pretty big. I'll probably try again with the newer and much smaller manual at some point (when I have a bit of time to study, but before somebody wants to translate it into any other language). Sharing the misery, Mari