Now as we focus on the translation problems, er, opportunities, I'd like a definitive answer about this. Which of the following formatting paragraph styles does the translation team find more friendly: When in anger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. or: When in anger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Specificly, should each sentence from the source document be: 1) lines justified all together into the semblance of a paragraph; or 2) a separate line, no matter how long it gets.

Personaly, I prefer #2 where each sentence forms its own formatting object. This avoids any distractions trying to minic the final document layout. I've seen diffs that just changed "the end. The", with two spaces, into "the end. The", with a single space. Ultimately, the point of XML DocBook is to separate content from presentation so I could live with either, but I'm no translator. Well, maybe if you consider redneck-to-english a formal process ;-) I'm not advocating layout surgery on existing content, but would like a "best practices" recomendation from the folks who know what they are talking about. Cheers

On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 10:58 -0400, Mark Johnson wrote: >Tommy Reynolds wrote: > >>Now as we focus on the translation problems, er, >>opportunities, I'd like a definitive answer about this. >> >>Which of the following formatting paragraph styles does the translation team >>find more friendly: >> >> When in anger or in doubt, run in >> circles, scream and shout. The >> quick brown fox jumped over the >> lazy dog. >> >>or: >> >> When in anger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. >> The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. >> >>Specificly, should each sentence from the source document be: >> >> 1) lines justified all together into the semblance >> of a paragraph; or >> 2) a separate line, no matter how long it gets. > >Hopefully, the new XML diff tools won't care which style is used. But I >guess we need to hear from translation to get the definitive answer on >this. FWIW, glad you raised this issue, T. > >"Only your translator knows for sure..." Right... xmlformat doesn't care about preserving any presentation other than inside CDATA type containers. *Unless* we decide to go the other way and use "foo-doc-XX.xml" for each language, in which case we can restrict tidy-bowl to just particular languages. AFAIK, xmlformat will not be able to respect parallel structures based on the "lang" attribute.