Re: Fwd: A system for localizing documentation strings

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > I would imagine that we can tweak make-docfile to generate a POT file,
 > as Andreas suggests, but the other part of gettext is to call some
 > function to replace the original string with its translation, when
 > that string needs to be presented to the user.  How does one do that,
 > if the original string is not there to begin with?

The original string is in the DOC file, is it not?

 > What am I missing here?

I not sure, but I would guess that it's that gettext() can be called
on the value returned by a function.  gettext() doesn't know or care
whether its argument is a literal string compiled into the binary or
extracted from an external file at runtime.  All that matters is that
neither the process of creating the DOC file nor the process of
extracting a docstring from the DOC file can change one bit of the
string that is used as an index to gettext().