Inline markup and languages without space characters

[jnavila]

For the translation of the git man pages, we are using the po4a framework which already provides a reliable segmentation of paragraphs and blocks into po entries.

However, there are some inline elements that are quite common (and similar to those of markdown syntax) that we would like to handle in the translations. For example, code spans enclosed in backticks (`code`), or emphasized text enclosed in asterisks (*emphasis*). The processors expect the start markers to be prefixed by a non-word character or the beginning of the line, and the end markers to be followed by a non-word character or the end of the line. This is easy to achieve and natural for most western languages, but for CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and other languages, where there are no spaces between words, this becomes problematic.

I'm already using the placeholder mechanism of weblate in order to mark the constant strings such as git commands which are backticked but I haven't found a way to handle the surrounding of these inline markers yet.

Do you have any suggestions on how to best handle this situation? Is there a way to customize the po4a processing or the weblate placeholders to accommodate CJK languages better in this context?

[nijel]

Weblate has such a check for reStructuredText (https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/user/checks.html#inconsistent-restructuredtext), but there is currently no such detailed check for Markdown.