Dave, This is one area that requires careful walking. There are pretty strict legal regulations, depending on sales location, on what kind of documentation has to be available to the person purchasing a mobile phone. The legal requirements for netbooks are different, as are for in-vehicle systems. So this will require a bit of differentiation depending on system type.
A lot of the documentation, for example for the default applications, could be written by anybody who is qualified in technical writing. It might be worth looking at what formats robohelp produces and see if those can be done with other tools as well. Or maybe write directly in xml (in whatever dialect is necessary) and convert that to po and html as necessary. In one sentence, the majority of the documentation could use community love, but parts of it are regulated by laws. Tero > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] > On Behalf Of ext Dave Neary > Sent: 29 March, 2010 20:27 > To: Foster, Margie > Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] > Subject: Re: [MeeGo-dev] On device help framework > > 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 _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
