Re: 19990511: NetCDF manual in Japanese

>To: address@hidden
>cc: address@hidden
>From: address@hidden (Masato Shiotani)
>Subject: NetCDF manual in Japanese
>Organization: .
>Keywords: 199905110338.VAA23346

Hi,

> I am a Japanese atmospheric scientist in Hokkaido University and have
> a great interest in NetCDF.  We have a community in which members are
> also interested in NetCDF.  Recently we have gotten some funding for
> computer sciences and in this small project we plan to make a Japanese 
> manual of NetCDF.
> 
> Questions are:
> 
> 1. Is it possible to make a Japanese NetCDF manual based on the
> original? 

Yes, feel free to use anything in the existing netCDF User's Guides.
We currently have a C Users Guide and a Fortran Users Guide, as well
as a short supplement on the C++ interface and some "javadoc"
documentation for the Java implementation.  You are free to use any of
these to prepare a Japanese version.

The original C and Fortran manuals are currently derived from a single
FrameMaker source, which contains all the common text as well as the
differences between the C and Fortran versions.  We also derived the
HTML versions on the web from the FrameMaker source.  If you only want
to translate one guide, it might be easier to use the HTML version.
However if you needed both the C and Fortran guide, then it might be
worthwhile to use FrameMaker to work from the original source.  If
you need the FrameMaker version, please let me know.

> 2. If it comes out, how do we treat the copyright of the Japanese
> manual?

You are free to write your own copyright for the Japanese version.

> I would like to know your policy for this subject.

Our policy is that the netCDF documentation should be openly available
much like the netCDF source code.  Translating it into Japanese makes
it more widely available, so we're in favor of that.

I hope to get time in the next couple of months to add documentation
of a few more netCDF features that are currently undocumented, in
particular the "underbar underbar" functions nc__open, nc__create, and
nc__endef for C and similar functions for Fortran.  These functions
have extra parameters which allow control of the netCDF internals with
respect to I/O buffering and file layout, and permit reserving space
in the header and fixed-size variable sections for later additions
(for example adding new variables) that avoid copying.

--Russ

_____________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                         UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                     http://www.unidata.ucar.edu