Hi everyone and Wolfgang in particular ;) I prepared a code snippet that is able to remove some untranslatable strings from the manuals. I tested it locally (as a separate script) on the Debian Edu bullseye manual, but more rigorous testing is probably advisable before taking it into production. I suppose the snippet could be appended to scripts/get_manual, although I could not test this here. ---- begin code snippet ----- # create $name-stripped.xml # wich will remove some non-translatable strings # ---remove untranslatable image names--- # echo "removing image names" sed -e 's#<imagedata.*</imageobject>#</imageobject>#g' $xmlfile > $name-stripped.xml # ---remove paragraphs that just have a <ulink> and no other text--- # echo "removing link paragraphs" #---# first copy those paragraphs to a tempfile #---# TMPFILE3=$(mktemp) cat $xmlfile | sed -n '/^<para><ulink/p' | sed -n '/> *$/p' > $TMPFILE3 #---# then replace those links with an empty string #---# #---# and keep only the <para> tag to prevent xml from being broken #---# while read line ; do sed -i "s#$line#<para>#" $name-stripped.xml done < $TMPFILE3 # ---remove FIXME: paragraphs--- # # ---(currently that colon is missing in some FIXME paragraphs)--- # echo "removing FIXME: paragraphs" sed -i '/^FIXME\:/d' $name-stripped.xml ---- end code snippet ----- For this to be useful, also po4a.cfg needs a small addition. It should look like this (with the added pot_in line): [po_directory] . [type: docbook] debian-edu-bullseye-manual.xml \ pot_in:debian-edu-bullseye-manual-stripped.xml \ $lang:$lang.xml \ add_$lang:?./$lang.add \ opt:"-o nodefault='<inlinemediaobject> <imagedata>' -o untranslated='<listitem> <inlinemediaobject> <imagedata>' -M UTF-8 -k 15" With this enabled, the Debian Edu bullseye manual counts 1154 translatable strings |