On 30 Jul, Sven Neumann wrote:
>> Sorry, this page hasn't been written in <Language> yet. Would you
>> like to read this help in <available Languagelinks> instead?
> As you might have noticed the creators of the help system have already
> thought about that. The current help-system does not yet support
> multi-language help files, but the current directory structure and the
> code should allow to add this feature anytime with little effort. Our
> plan so far was to use a simple shell-script to create links to
> english pages where other translations are not yet done.
Okay, I haven't noticed the links yet. Or is this not implemented yet?
> AFAIK there is no DocBook browser and we certainly don't want to write
> one. The format is not even intended to be browsed directly. Creating
> HTML from it will (at least in the short term) be the right thing to
> do.
A few persons on IRC stated they'd also like a printed reference.
(Yes, I know your book and it's great, but still) :)
> I'm all for using DocBook to create the help files if and only if the
> help authors feel comfortable with it, someone who knows DocBook and
> all that stylesheet stuff volunteers to help and Yosh as the gimp
> maintainer gives his OK, since he will have to build the releases.
Yes.
>> Tools: yes, Time: I doubt that. Automatically processing text makes
>> things faster not lenghtier...
> If you would have ever used Jade, you'd know that it adds a
> significant amount of time. Processing SGML is a very CPU-intensive
> and time-consuming task (at least with the available tools).
It didn't mean CPU time. From this view you're right. I originally
wrote about development time.
>> It's not that hard. I could do that...
> Do I read, you could do that, or you will do that??
Since I volunteered to help with the docs it's more 'I will do that'.
Time is no issue at the moment and big parts of my time are dedicated
to GIMP. There's a bigger problem in support terms.
> I'd vote for a plug-in API reference separated from the normal users
> help. This API reference could be automatically created from the
> plug-in sources. But please let us concentrate on finishing the
> libgimp API reference before we start another project.
Second that.
> What advantage would we have if the help files are stored separately
> if the release is going to include it anyway? Anyway, the one who
> creates the releases should decide that.
It will be a nightmare to coordinate the progress on the docs. We've
counted 5 people on IRC willing to contribute. It's very likely that
they will be more when this part has really started, and one person
should handle that? In my eyes it's sort of overkill. Put it somewhere
else, give the, let's say 20, people CVS access to it and bundle it
at release time or even not if you don't like that.
--
Servus,
Daniel
