[pmwiki-users] Problem with utf & i18n (French accented characters)

Michel srt at vergne.org
Wed Jun 13 05:08:02 CDT 2007


Hello,

I am discovering PmWiki since some weeks. Great work! Thanks.
I am French, and I use PmWiki with pages mixing French an Japanese
languages. So, I use UTF-8. To achieve that, I have indicated the charset
in the template page.


Le Sat, 09 Jun 2007 10:08:19 -0500, Patrick R. Michaud a écrit :

> For a variety of reasons, the PmWikiFr.* pages (including PmWikiFr.XLPage)
> have been built using iso-8859-1 encoding instead of utf-8.  So, they
> will tend to not display correctly inside of a utf-8 encoded page.

I noticed the problem, and at first, it seemed rather simple to solve :
just converting documentation pages, and XLpage. I have done the
job, but it is not immediatly usable...

Doing that, I have discovered another problem which seems to give more
trouble. The name of some pages has been modified to include accents. From
my point of view, it is not a good idea, because now, the documentation
structure differs depending of the language. I guess that updating
process will be more difficult and less accurate.
So, I have also modified page names to come back to English names, by
indicating the page name in links [[english name|french name]]. There is
some side effect, for example when a page displays its own name as
title... But now, I have stopped working on this subject. I am afraid that
the next update will erase my work.

> iso-8859-1 versions.  But managing all of that -- separate sets of
> encodings for each language translations, and trying to explain
> to admins when to use each -- is likely to be a real headache.
> 
> I'm very much open for suggestions on this topic.  

I apologize in advance because I am new to Pmwiki, and my ideas are
perhaps too simple for the context.

I suggest first to set-up a rule of game : the name of pages of the
"official" documentation must remain the english name. Foreign translators
may add pages of their own, but there must be a page with english name for
each "offical" documentation page. Perhaps, this page may just jump to
another page with foreign name...

Once the rule is set up, French-UTF8 is just another language. Webmaster
can choose between country-utf8 and country-iso if both exist depending of
their needs.

I have not yet written to the French translation team. I don't know "the
variety of reasons". I prefer ear first your advices here, due to your
experiences with other languages. Thanks.

Michel





More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list