The tech writer is willing to look at ways to make the help a collaborative 
effort, but not for this first release. There is a lot of pressure on everyone 
to get things done, and she is no exception. I think once we get that first 
release out the door, then we can take a deep breath, and really look at the 
various options. I am really happy to see that there are folks in the community 
that want to "help with the help." 

Margie

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dimitris 
Glezos
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2010 11:34 PM
To: Dave Neary
Cc: Foster, Margie; [email protected]; [email protected]; 
[email protected]
Subject: Re: [MeeGo-dev] On device help framework

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Dave Neary <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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? :-) )

This is right. Docbook can be exported to standard PO files which can
be translated normally from Transifex.

> 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.

My point of view as well. Documentation and translations should be
treated the same way as code. I believe we _can_ find workflows which
allow careful merging of only the best documentation to be published,
just like Tero suggested.

> 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).

I'm afraid this will be a tough decision if we'll try to satisfy everyone.

FYI, another format natively supported by Tx is Red Hat's Publican:

  http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
  https://fedorahosted.org/publican/

Example output:

  http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f12/en-US/html/

-d

-- 
Dimitris Glezos

Transifex: The Multilingual Publishing Revolution
http://www.transifex.net/ -- http://www.indifex.com/
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