Re: @dircategory (Re: Translating Emacs manuals is of strategic importance)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 21:52:23 +0100
> From: Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>,
> 	Vincent Belaïche <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>,
> 	emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org, help-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> In any case, if a target manual is not yet translated, to me it is the
> responsibility of the translator of amnual linking to it to either link
> to the english manual, or to translate the node name in @ref even though
> it won't lead to an existing manual and the name may need to be changed
> later on to match with the actual name used in the translated manual.
> To me both case could make sense depending on many criteria, such as
> whether readers are likely to read english, whether manuals are
> being translated...

The translator doesn't always know whether a translated manual exists
when the translation is being written.  And even if a translated
manual does exist, there's no reason to be sure it will be installed
on the end-user's system.

So it would be good to have some Texinfo feature that would make the
behavior of Info readers more user-friendly in these cases.  Right
now, the Texinfo features that can help are @documentlanguage and the
suggestion by Gavin to have in the translated manual an @anchor for
each @node with the original English name of that @node.

> In any case, I don't see any reason to do any automatic redirection in
> the Info reader, it should remain simple and be the translators/writers
> responsibilities.

I don't think I agree, because leaving this completely to the
responsibilities of the translator could easily produce sub-optimal
results.

> Another reason is that it would not be possible to do the same in
> HTML, as in HTML it is not possible to check if the target exists.

Even if this cannot possibly be done in HTML (and I'm not yet sure),
it shouldn't stop us from doing that in Info.  After all, HTML output
lacks several features of Info output already, and it doesn't stop us.