Re: ommiting header causes multibyte errors

[Bruno Haible]

Ariel Shkedi wrote:
> (And having --omit-header have the side effect of converting to ascii 
> just seems wrong, especially when there isn't an official option to do 
> that in xgettext.)

Absolutely. And what does a chinese glyph like 難 look like when converted
to ASCII?

> It's not the msgid "", it's the empty: "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n".

Ah, but that's easy to fix: Pass the --msgid-bugs-address option to xgettext.
The meaning of that line is explained in the gettext manual, section
"Filling in the Header Entry".

> Editing it (adding the translations), and not with any tool written for 
> .po files, just a text editor - probably notepad on windows, since it can 
> handle UTF-8, and I know they have it.
> 
> And yes, I'm worried about them messing up the format, but I'll probably 
> be able to fix it if that happens.

If you leave the header in, you give them the freedom to use other editors
for PO files (Kbabel, gnome-translation, poedit, emacs, LocaleFactory, ...)

The fields in the header entry, listed in section "Filling in the Header Entry",
were not added to the PO file format arbitrarily. It took a long discussion
to eliminate the unnecessary ones.

By the way, communicating with the translators can take time, something that
you can do with 2 or 5 but not any longer with 20 translators. If your
package is free software, you are welcome to submit is .pot file to the
Free Translation Project, so that translators from many more teams can
tackle it.

Bruno