POT and PO Files Used for Documentation
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POT and PO Files Used for Documentation

This is meant as a short overview of the peculiarities of those file formats in the process of doc translation -- basically, you already know them from the part on GUI translation.

The files that have to be translated are in Unicode UTF-8 format with the extension .pot and .po. But this is only for the convenience of translators. Originally, the English documentation is included in DocBook files (see above). Once the documentation author commits a documentation to the SVN, the program xml2pot extracts the translatable strings from the file. It then writes those strings to a POT file. Basically, the resulting POTs do not differ too much from what you already know from the GUI files.

Caution

The next paragraph is outdated. The update_xml must be run by hand to create the translated DocBook documentation file.

The English POT file is the common ground for the translation teams which produce for each POT file one PO for their language. These localized PO files provide the translated strings, from which the program po2xml produces the translated DocBook file. po2xml is regularly run on the l10n.kde.org server. If a KDE user eventually has set the standard language in KDE to for example "German" or "Icelandic" and opens the KDE help center, this translated DocBook files are processed by the help ioslave from Stephan Kulow and the resulting HTML files are shown on screen. The automatic generation of the translated DocBook files by po2xml require the PO files to be syntactically correct.

You can find the English DocBook documentation in subdirectories of the source code for the corresponding package. The POT files and the translated PO files and DocBook files for all languages are located in the KDE package named kde-i18n. For the package "EXAMPLE" you will find

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