Multilingual book

Multilingual book#

This page reuses BSD 3-Clause License content from TeachBooks (2024). Find out more here.

User types

This page is useful for user type 3, 4 and 5.

Sphinx Extension

Introduction#

The custom launch button extension allows you to create a customizable button in the top right of your jupyter book. This may have many applications, one of them being that you can create different language versions of the book available for the user.

What does it do?#

This extension add a button to the top bar which allows you to link to other website. In combination with a translated book on another branch you can use this to create multilingual books.

Installation#

  1. Install the sphinx-launch-buttons package using pip if you’d like to build your book locally:

pip install sphinx-launch-buttons

  1. Make sure that the package is included in your project’s requirements.txt to track the dependency:

sphinx-launch-buttons

  1. To use the extension in your book, add the extension to the list of Sphinx extra extensions in your _config.yml file, (important: underscore, not dash this time):

sphinx:
  extra_extensions:
    - custom-launch-buttons

Usage#

This section will explain how to create a “Languages” button, like you might be used to seeing on just about any website. The use of the button, however, is completely customizable and may be used in many different ways.

  1. Include a _launch_buttons.yml file in the same location (root directory of your book) as your _config.yml file. The following code cell shows the main structure of that file.

buttons:
  - type : dropdown

  - type : button

Here, buttons is an array of launch buttons, each can be identified using 2 types: ‘dropdown’ or ‘button’. The cell above shows 2 buttons, one of type dropdown and one of type button.

The button/dropdown can be visualized using either an svg icon or text.

buttons:
  - type : dropdown
    label: Language
  - type : button
    icon : <svg> ... 
            </svg>

  1. Lastly you need to specify the items of your button. So assuming you want to have different language versions, each item will be one of the languages.

buttons:
  - type : dropdown
    label: Language

  - type : button
    icon : <svg> ... 
            </svg> 
    items:
      - label: English
        url: url of branch
      - label: Nederlands
        url: url of branch

As you can see in the items: line, each dropdown option links to the branch of the repository in the respective language.

Setting up your repository for multilingual book#

For the implementation to your book, it is handy to create a branch for each language version you want to offer. Make a new branch using for example main as a source. Assuming we want to create a dutch version of you can call this branch Dutch or Nederlands.

You will then need to translate the content in the dutch branch to dutch which can take some time. From experience, DeepL is a good tool for this but any AI chatbot might be helpful as well. Make sure to proofread the translation.

You’ll need to add (merge) the updated _config.yml and the new _launch_buttons.yml to all of your branches.

Example#

buttons:
  - type: dropdown
    icon: <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="16" height="16" fill="currentColor" class="bi bi-globe" viewBox="0 0 16 16">
            <path d="M0 8a8 8 0 1 1 16 0A8 8 0 0 1 0 8m7.5-6.923c-.67.204-1.335.82-1.887 1.855A8 8 0 0 0 5.145 4H7.5zM4.09 4a9.3 9.3 0 0 1 .64-1.539 7 7 0 0 1 .597-.933A7.03 7.03 0 0 0 2.255 4zm-.582 3.5c.03-.877.138-1.718.312-2.5H1.674a7 7 0 0 0-.656 2.5zM4.847 5a12.5 12.5 0 0 0-.338 2.5H7.5V5zM8.5 5v2.5h2.99a12.5 12.5 0 0 0-.337-2.5zM4.51 8.5a12.5 12.5 0 0 0 .337 2.5H7.5V8.5zm3.99 0V11h2.653c.187-.765.306-1.608.338-2.5zM5.145 12q.208.58.468 1.068c.552 1.035 1.218 1.65 1.887 1.855V12zm.182 2.472a7 7 0 0 1-.597-.933A9.3 9.3 0 0 1 4.09 12H2.255a7 7 0 0 0 3.072 2.472M3.82 11a13.7 13.7 0 0 1-.312-2.5h-2.49c.062.89.291 1.733.656 2.5zm6.853 3.472A7 7 0 0 0 13.745 12H11.91a9.3 9.3 0 0 1-.64 1.539 7 7 0 0 1-.597.933M8.5 12v2.923c.67-.204 1.335-.82 1.887-1.855q.26-.487.468-1.068zm3.68-1h2.146c.365-.767.594-1.61.656-2.5h-2.49a13.7 13.7 0 0 1-.312 2.5m2.802-3.5a7 7 0 0 0-.656-2.5H12.18c.174.782.282 1.623.312 2.5zM11.27 2.461c.247.464.462.98.64 1.539h1.835a7 7 0 0 0-3.072-2.472c.218.284.418.598.597.933M10.855 4a8 8 0 0 0-.468-1.068C9.835 1.897 9.17 1.282 8.5 1.077V4z"/>
          </svg>
    items:
      - label: English
        url: https://teachbooks.github.io/files-and-folders/EN
      - label: Nederlands
        url: https://teachbooks.github.io/files-and-folders/NL

The code in the above cell is the _launch_buttons.yml file of a repository called “files-and-folders”. The buttons created look like this:

../../_images/language_button.PNG

Fig. 107 Custom Button#

Contribute#

This tool’s repository is stored on GitHub. The README.md of the branch manual is also part of the TeachBooks manual as a submodule. If you’d like to contribute, you can create a fork and open a pull request on the GitHub repository. To update the README.md shown in the TeachBooks manual, create a fork and open a merge request for the GitHub repository of the manual. If you intent to clone the manual including its submodules, clone using: git clone --recurse-submodulesgit@github.com:TeachBooks/manual.git.

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