Hi, Foster, Margie wrote: > The tech writer is going to use a product called RoboHelp to generate > the HTML help. This product also produces XML, which we will then > convert to PO files (probably using xml2po) which we can post on > Transifex for localization. After the PO file is translated, we use > the same tool to convert back to XML with the translations.
Eek! So there's no way for collaboratively writing the HTML docs? For translations, xml2po + transifex should work OK. I've never used Transifex myself, but my understanding is that it allows paragraph-by-paragraph translation - is that right? (Dimitris, are you here? :-) ) We worked out a bunch of things which are required to allow documentation to be a collaborative process between professional tech writers and the community for Maemo. From memory, the most important were: * Release early drafts * Making small changes should be easy for users & developers - Fixing typos, making minor additions, re-statements, etc needs to be something any registered user can do easily * Making substantive changes should be possible - It should be feasible for a volunteer to re-write or re-organise a chapter & have his proposed change reviewed by the documentation owner * The doc owner should be able to integrate user-contributed documentation easily into "official" docs In short, documentation should be like code - no dependency on closed tools, the ability to make & propose changes, and have those changes reviewed & rejected or accepted. The closest we came to a toolchain that allowed this was to use source control (which failed the "small changes should be easy" test) or a wiki (which puts a little more work on the docs maintainer in terms of reviewing changes, and makes it harder to translate & convert to other formats). But RoboHelp puts us back to square one - making changes as a volunteer becomes impossible, unless we can establish some kind of workflow where docs changes can be proposed through Bugzilla & someone (you?) commits to reviewing things in a timely manner... I suspect we'd lose a lot of the energy we could otherwise leverage doing this, though. What are your thoughts vis à vis social requirements for the toolchain? Cheers, Dave. -- maemo.org docsmaster Email: [email protected] Jabber: [email protected] _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
