[publican-list] sortable lists, esp. glossaries

Jeff Fearn jfearn at redhat.com
Tue Jan 31 03:15:56 UTC 2012


On 01/31/2012 12:16 AM, Fred Dalrymple wrote:
> Thanks for the pointer (I didn't look far enough back in the archives).
>
> In general, if there is no automated programmatic solution, then I'd probably introduce an external file that would point at entries that didn't follow the programmatic default and provide either a clue or explicit sorting key -- think RDF resources (though I'm partial to Topic Maps).

Requiring 1 writer to order their list is a bit spendthrift, requiring 
50 translators to order them just blew your budget. Doing it manually 
just does not scale.

Don't ask "how can I do this" or "how can I do this in $language", ask 
"how can I do this in 50 languages?" If you come up with 'manually' then 
you didn't multiply effort by 50 properly or you aren't holding yourself 
accountable for how your choices affect other people.

> Perhaps verbose, but if a machine can't figure it out automatically, what can you do?

It can depend on what you are contractually required to do. Like say if 
you were contractually required to ensure a translation had the same 
level of presentation and editorship as the source language, then doing 
such things in an un-automated fashion might expose you to very 
expensive repercussions.

> Actually, I'd assumed this in the solution because I'm thinking about non-alphabetic sorting needs, like the order of introduction of terms, perhaps on a per-topic basis (and yes, enabling solutions in forms other than print).

DocBook already has attributes to allow this kind of sorting for some 
lists, it's useless from a translation perspective. We did consider 
modifying the translation tools to expose these attributes to the 
translators, but the issue of scale raised it's ugly head and we 
realised we couldn't afford the impact on translation time.

Cheers, Jeff.

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