For what it's worth, here is my opinion on the Tip of the Day messages
and their translations. In summary: keep it simple! I know that
being the one who introduced these tips in the Gimp does not grant me
any special priviledges (especially since I am not translating them)
but it looks like the easiest option for the translators would be to
put the tips in a .h header file and the translations in .po files.
Although it could appear to be less flexible than using an XML file,
the header file has the advantage that it can be translated in the
exact same way as any other part of the Gimp, without requiring any
special method or special tool. All translators who are able to
translate the code of the Gimp will automatically know what they have
to do in order to translate the tips (this is important for those who
come from the GNOME translation team and may not be very familiar with
the Gimp yet). It will also reduce the size of the code because we do
not use a separate parser and all the gettext stuff is already used by
other parts of the code. (*)
As Sven already mentioned, the solution would consist of adding a new
file gimp_tips.h in the source code, containing something like this:
const gchar *tips[] =
{
N_("This is the first tip."),
N_("This is the second tip and it has <b>bold</b> text."),
N_("This is the last tip. Now, you are on your own.")
};
gint n_tips = G_N_ELEMENTS (tips);
The multi-line tips should be included in one string (with line
breaks) because that will be easier to translate.
This format does not prevent anybody from exporting the tips to an XML
or HTML file and then importing it into another tool. For example, we
could include the following very simple program in the source
distribution of the Gimp:
#include "config.h"
#include <stdio.h>
#include "libgimp/gimpintl.h"
#include "gimp_tips.h"
int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
gint i;
INIT_LOCALE ("gimp");
printf ("<gimp-tips>\n");
for (i = 0; i < n_tips; i++)
{
printf (" <tip>\n %s\n </tip>\n", tips[i]);
}
printf ("</gimp-tips>\n");
}
This very simple program (or a more elaborated version of it) would
allow any translator to output the strings in any format that is
suitable for usage in another environment.
-Raphael
(*) Here, I am talking both about the number of lines of source code
that have to be maintained and the size of the compiled
application. The size of the initialized data will be increased
by 6 KB.
