manpages translation project

[Khaled Hosny <dr dot khaled dot hosny at gmail dot com>]

After struggle with the CVS in the last night (thanks to M. Sameer for
the initial import, and to Nadim for correcting the lots of mistakes
that I made), the initial PO[T] files of the project are available in
the CVS ( under translate/manpages ). So, we announce the start of the
project.

What is that:
-------------
	This project aims to translate UNIX manual pages into Arabic, making
them accessible to the Arabic users.
All of us know the importance of manual pages, being one of the
traditions in the UNIX like OS's, there is nearly man page for every
thing, and thus it is too important to have them in Arabic if we speak
about localizing GNU/Linux (and the others) in the Arabic world.

The project plane:
------------------
	After many (failed) trays to choose appropriate manpages to start with,
I think the easiest way is to divide the project into tow steps, the
first is translating manpages that is included in the man-pages package
http:// , the second is translating man pages that come with the
individual packages (katoob's manpage for example).

The project status:
-------------------
	Just started, there is 17 translated pages for now.

How to contribute:
------------------
	If you want to contribute in this, pike any PO file from the CVS and
start translating it (for more details, see CVS and translator
how-to's).
If you don't like any of the available files and want to translate
specific manpages, just send it to me and I'll be glade to convert it to
PO file for you (or see below, how to do that).
Also you can help in adding Arabic support to groff and other manpages
related stuff (see below).

How to convert manpage to PO file:
----------------------------------
	This is too easy, just download and install po4a package
(http://po4a.alioth.debian.org), to convert manpage to PO file:

$po4a-gettextize -f man -m the_manpage -p foo.po

,to convert it back to manpage:

$po4a-translate -f man -m the_original_manpage -p the_PO_file -l
the_new_manpage
(see po4a documentation).

How to use it:
--------------
	It should be easy to use the Arabic manpages as "man" supports multiple
sets of internationalized manpages, but unfortunately groff (the "man"
backend) doesn't support neither Arabic nor Unicode.
The only work around (AFAIK), is to use ma2html or any help viewer that
supports Arabic (like yelp in gnome, konqueror in kde). 

The problems:
-------------
	The main problem is lack of Arabic support in groff, until solving
that, the use of the Arabic manpages will be too limited.
Also man2html has a small problem, it generates HTML files with LTR
layout which lead to incorrect arrangement of Arabic and English words,
it should be RTL with Arabic pages.

----------
Khaled Hosny