#ubuntu-doc report for 2004-01-03

[Sean Wheller]

On Wednesday 05 January 2005 00:13, Alexander Poslavsky wrote:
> > >  - Menus are going to be defined in a centralised way, and references
> > > to menu items will become really easy to enter in DocBook, in all the
> > > documents we are working on.
> > >    Note: this is what I understood about the reasoning behind
> > >    "menuchoice", but I could be mistaken.  Froud and Plovs please
> > >    correct me if I'm wrong.
> >
> > Yes. Menus are used often in manuals. I anticipate they will be used
> > across all documents. So the idea is to have their definitions in a
> > single place (common/menus/) and define them as entities. This was an
> > author can use entity inclusion to bring in the menu actions the user has
> > to do. Since they are all defined in a single place it saves physically
> > duplicating the menuchoice structure, makes writing faster. Should the
> > menus change is an upcoming release then we will not have to search out
> > and replace all instances where the menu actions are used. We willjust
> > update the XML instance of the menu defined in  common/menus/ and all
> > places where the instance was included are automatically updated.
>
> Remember that if you want to add a menu-definition you have to:
>
<snip what="orderedlist"/>
>
> and it will print the contents of common/menus/nvu.xml, which is
> pretty neat if you ask me.
>
> Question: How can this benefit translators?

When translating nvu.xml for example, they need do it only once. When 
translating Quick, FAQ and User Guides they do not translate references to 
&nvu; that stays as it is. The result is less to translate so faster 
translations.

The effect is not yet visible to us. However, the more people reference the 
entities the greater the effect will be over time.

-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
http://www.inwords.co.za
Registered Linux User #375355
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