Which place for docs in French, German, etc?

[Ulrik Vieth]

Alan wrote:

> I think this should be up to the package writer.  Personally I'd use
> something like:
>
>    doc/dvips/dvips.tex  (master)
>    doc/dvips/dvips-fr.tex (french translation)
>    doc/dvips/dvips-de.tex (german translation)
>
> etc. possibly with a symbolic link dvips-en.tex -> dvips.tex.

Given that only very few packages have documentation in multiple
languages, I'd tend to support this approach of putting all the
available documentation for some package into the same directory.  

However, I doubt whether Alan's naming scheme is a workable solution
if the package name is too long (i.e. longer than 5 characaters) 
or if the documentation sources (possibly consisting of multiple 
files per language) should be kept along with the .dvi/.ps files.
In that case there could be good reasons to use subdirectories
per language below doc/<category>/<package>/, but only for those 
packages where documentation in multiple languages exists, i.e.
something like

  texmf/doc/<category>/<package>/[<language>/]...

where <language> would be an optional level, only if needed. 

In principle, I wouldn't have anything against a doc/<language>/...
approach either, if documentation were generally available in 
multiple languages, but since that is currently not the case, 
it seems not worthwhile at present.  Better find documentation 
in whatever language it is available than nothing at all.

What I really wouldn't like, however, is an inconsistent approach
of having a doc/<language>/ directory as a fallback or catch-all
in between the doc/<category>/ directories, as it is currently
the case in teTeX and Sebastian's CD.  Here, doc/german/<package>
mostly corresponds to doc/latex/<package>, but doc/german/misc
also includes stuff that really belongs into doc/general/.
I'd really like to see that sorted out before the CD comes out.

Cheers, Ulrik.


P.S. Even if a German translation of an English manual or book 
is available, I'd personally tend to prefer the English version, 
since that is the original and therefore probably more accuarate 
and reliable than any translation.  Besides, German translations 
of Computer English often tend to be somewhat awkward since many
technical terms don't have a good translation in German, so one 
ends up with Anglicized German (or Germanized English?), which 
might be much worse to read than the original in real English.  
(My preferences might be slightly different for a German original
with an English translation, in which case I'd use both versions.)