No Subject

[Anirudh Sanjeev]

Hi Shaun!

Excerpts from Shaun McCance's message of Mon Apr 05 23:23:48 +0530 2010:
> Is this something that could just be built into Yelp, perhaps
> as a plugin? I've already talked with other documentation teams
> about making Yelp able to query the package manager for extra
> documentation.
I don't see why this shouldn't be a problem. In fact, it'll save me a lot
of trouble. I will prod the source of yelp today.
Does it rely on an embedded Webkit/Gecko system to display the text, or
pure Pango/Cairo?

Either way, it'll be a feasible addition to my list of deliverables.

> I just want to point out that the wiki model only works for
> a very small percentage of the wikis in the world. For wikis
> to work effectively, you must have people actively gardening
> them. Otherwise they get crowded out by weeds.
It's not exactly a wiki model. If you create a tutorial, I can make a
derived work from it. I can only re-upload changes which maybe you can
incorporate. Ranking will be done via user rating, traffic, length of
engagement on tutorial, etc - so it's not a vanilla wiki model

> But unless you keep the server completely closed, there will
> be alternative installations. And if you keep it closed, then
> either people won't use it, or they'll reverse engineer it.
> Rather than fighting this, maybe you should investigate ways
> to federate the content.
The server won't be closed. I just want to discourage different teams
running their own instances in the beginning until a community forms around
the idea. If people are willing to reverse engineer it (the formats and
transports are all very simple), I will look at it as validation of my
idea.

I still haven't decided when to release the code. It's not a question of
"if", it's a question of "when".

> The text portion is the easy part for translators. Taking
> new screenshots is the hard part. Note that translators
> aren't usually the expert users that the writers are, so
> they might have to do a lot of setup to get to the point
> where they can take equivalent screenshots.
One ridiculously ugly hack I can think of is to use gconf to modify the
language each time the "take screenshot" button is pressed so the Desktop
switches to individual languages and takes a screenshot for each one of
them. Since Gnome doesn't need to restart for applying language changes (or
I think it doesn't, based on my little experience with this functionality),
this _just_ might work.

I was also considering using OCR in the long term to identify the content
on the screen and make it searchable, so you can search for individual menu
items and tutorials that feature it will turn up. Maybe this can be
employed to help with translations.

> But there are some exceptional cases where some formats
> shine over others. You should look at some of the things
> Mallard does for translators (and I should finish writing
> the documentation for those things). Or just use Mallard
> as your underlying format.
Yes, I plan to actually _write_ some documentation for some project I like
to understand the process and understand the pain points, etc, and to
consider where I can use Mallard formatting instead of Markdown, etc.

Thanks,
Anirudh
-- 
Senior Undergraduate Student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
http://anirudhsanjeev.org

The Unix philosophy - Do one thing. Do it well.