[Scribus] Documentation

[Craig Bradney]

Hi,

> I have a few questions about documentation, which  could be also of some
> interest for non-English native speakers:
> 
> 1. Documentation file format. Dear Scribus team, if somebody decided to
> provide you with Scribus documentation in his native language to be
> included into Scribus (Help>Scribus Manual...),  which file format would
> you prefere? Is Docbook suitable for you? Are there any other restrictions?

As has been stated numerous times on the mailing list, the 1.2 release
will be accompanied by a new set of up-to-date and more complete 1.2
docs, both in an online format and with the program version (possibly as
a separate package due to its size).

Once the docs are complete, translators will be given the opportunity to
receive the files and then translate them. The opportunity for
translation may come after 1.2 is actually released (based on our time
to get them all finished in time), but as above, a separate package is
expected to be made and this will be installable/updatable separately
from Scribus 1.2 itself. We will make EVERY effort to get the
documentation package ready to be translated before the 1.2 release if
possible. 

The new website can already handle multiple languages.

We REALLY would appreciate having docs in multiple languages.


The format is HTML (CSS already defined), and basically the same content
is used for both the online and on disk manual. Screenshots are done in
English so far and would need to be redone.

DocBook generated HTML is ugly and painful to clean up for the Qt help
browser's limited abilities, which we dont have much choice with. We
experimented with a few options and fell back to a very simple HTML
supported by CSS. 

> 2. Documentation contents. What are the preferable contents?
> 
>         a. Translation of the original Scribus docs written by mrdocs
> 	and Co.?
> 	b. Any other contents suitable contents? Personally, I would vote for
> 	this solution, since there are some good docs in French and German (by
> 	Holger and Yves), which probably could be easily accustomed to your
> 	needs in no time, and there would be at least the Polish translation of
> 	Niyams	tutorials to start with. 

(a)

Note (a)-v1.2, also now contains Niyam's tutorial in a tutorial section.
We may beg, borrow and steal from other "freely licensed" tutorials that
have been written as long as the author doesn't mind us including them.
Note, most of the ones I have seen are now WAY out of date, especially
with screenshots, opinions of the authors are no longer valid etc. Most
of them need updating or rewriting from scratch. This will be even more
true by the time we get to 1.2

> 3. If 2a., would it be possible to allow the user simultanously
> installing and using Scribus many documentation packages,  in different
> languages at that? The first page of the dialog in Help>Scribus
> Manual... could list all the installed documentation packages, then, and allow the
> user to switch between  English, German, and so on. Personally,
> I'd prefere this approach, since I'd like to have both the Peter's English
> docs for reference, and German and Polish docs  
> in one place. And it would be easy to add new tutorials still to come..

Yes.. it will be possible, and it will be selected based on GUI
language. If no docs exist in the GUI language it will show US english
like the GUI does.

> 4. Licence. Currently, the English manual is distributed under Open
> Publication Licence (btw, according to http://www.opencontent.org/
> OpenConten was officially closed 1 year ago). If I decided to attach
> translated parts of it to the Polish translation of Niyam's tutorial,
woud it be allowed
> to licence them under GNU FDL? I wouldn't like to use diffent licences
> for one document, and Niyam's tutorial was released under GNU FDL.

The parts that we write are under OPL. We retain the right to publish
our docs in our chosen format, eg a book.

Any other parts of the docs remain in the license they were given in.
The source of information is clearly stated in the 1.2 docs. As above,
these 3rd party tutorials are in a "separate" section/menu.

regards
Craig
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