Robotframework: Support for sourcing documentation from files

[xylix]

The inspiration for this need came together when developing robotframework-browserlibrary and looking at the regionalities of robotframework users / documentation readers; we have heavy amount of users from Brasil and China, both of which are audiences with possible interest in translating documentation / using documentation in user's native language.

The current "python docstrings are keyword docs" solution, which is good for fast and small scale development, doesn't really scale for internationalization / other dynamic sourcing of documentation strings.

Personally as a developer I would also prefer the possibility to have separate documentation for a library's python and robotframework-APIs, which this would also make possible. Code examples are one thing that doesn't translate well between Python and RF API documentations.

One possibility could be sourcing docs from separate .json or .tsv files. User's being able to contribute documentation as changes that don't need to touch code files. Also a common pattern is to have excel docs that get exported into i18n files, which enables non-technical users to contribute translations more easily.

With the translation need, we should probably gauge community interest before committing to delivering this. With the developer interest, we should probably discuss about the benefits / weaknesses of this proposed approach.

[pekkaklarck]

Enhancing Libdoc so that it would get translated docs for each keyword from an external json or tsv file shouldn't be too complicated. If more features are needed, it might be better to start a new project that used Libdoc internally. It could then be developed independently from Robot's release schedule and didn't need to support all same Python versions.

[xylix]

Hm true. For libdoc generation the same python version support that core robot has is not necessary.

[pekkaklarck]

Another related feature would be translating keywords themselves as well ad their arguments. That support needed to be in the core. It would require a separate issue but translation files could be same for all this info.

[mkorpela]

Localization to non-english speaking languages especially possibility to localize also keywords, would be a major benefit for Robot Framework community in my opinion.