[scribus] French doc

Mon Jul 18 18:28:19 UTC 2011

2011/7/18 Gregory Pittman <gregp_ky at yahoo.com>

> On 07/18/2011 09:59 AM, Louis Desjardins wrote:
>
>> 2011/7/10 Craig Bradney<cbradney at zip.com.au>
>>
>>  On 7/10/11 8:26 AM, Louis Desjardins wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> When I install 1.4 RC5 on Mac OS X I have access to "Aide>  Manuel de
>>>> Scribus" (Help>  Scribus Manual) but it is in English.
>>>>
>>>> However it seems that on other platform the French Manual is accessible.
>>>>
>>> At
>>>
>>>> least on Ale's machine, it is.
>>>>
>>>> How can I have access to this help on a Mac?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Commit 15825 removed the installation of anything but English docs, on
>>> all platforms - as the others are way out of date.
>>>
>>
>>
>> This needs to be nuanced.
>>
>> I am only aware of 3 languages total, including English (original text),
>> French and German.
>>
>> It would be useful to have the sections tagged so we know what has been
>> updated and what has not.
>>
>> For instance, large parts if not all parts of the various pages about
>> Fonts
>> (Fonts in depth, Non-Latin fonts, etc.) are in the same state they were at
>> translation time and thus the FR translation for this part is still
>> totally
>> relevant.
>>
>> I can only suggest that we put a warning as a header to the sections that
>> have been re-written so the readers know that a particular part have been
>> significantly updated and they should refer to the English help and/or
>> give
>> a hand with the translation. This will increase the awareness about the
>> need
>> for good translation but can also serve as a basis for an updated text.
>> One
>> of the most difficult part in translating such texts as technical manual
>> is
>> the vocabulary and the co-occurrences (combination of words that you
>> cannot
>> find in a dictionary). Most of this job is now done in French and in
>> German
>> and can be of great help to translators taking over.
>>
>> I do not think that putting away all the translations just like that is
>> the
>> way to go.
>>
>> Mentioning "others are way out of date" seems a clear message but in fact
>> it
>> is too general as a statement. We need details at this point because in
>> any
>> event translation will be done word by word, sentence by sentence, section
>> by section. We need to know which parts need care.
>>
>> At first glance we can also tell the Online Help is quite outdated itself
>> in
>> some aspects. One screenshot show 1.3.0 cvs. The list of release dates and
>> versions stops Oct. 2010 with 1.3.9.
>>
>> As for the availability or relevantness of the other languages, the page
>> My
>> Tutorial has a link to a wiki page that is in English and refers to the
>> Tutorial by Nyam Bushan which is available and easy to find on the Scribus
>> website while the translation I made myself is much harder to find. I
>> don’t
>> discuss here about relevantness, I discuss the fact that this material is
>> available in its original form in English and has a translation done in
>> 2004
>> and if one is available, the other should be too. In fact, I see no reason
>> not to keep all that work available. They can by updated and/or translated
>> in other languages. To my knowledge, this tutorial is one of the very few
>> who talks about the PDF creation and edition capabillities of Scribus.
>>
>>
> I think these are a number of valid points. Even within the realm of
> English doc updates, it gets hard to recognize which parts need updates and
> which do not. I suppose we need some scheme to help. One of the difficulties
> is that the age of a part of the docs isn't necessarily an indicator of a
> need to update.
>
> Having said this, I am quite open to helping anyone who wishes to
> contribute to the documentation see what needs to be done, whether it's in
> the English or some other language section. It seems that Alessandro Levati
> will be helping to create a first-time Italian version of the online manual
> soon.
>
> Whenever we have solid, helpful documentation, we all benefit. I don't know
> why anyone would believe that something must be created in English and then
> translated. We might as easily have new documentation in French, Italian, or
> German that gets translated to English later. This is exactly what happened
> with the Working with Master Pages article on the wiki, which originally was
> submitted in German.[1]
>
> Once you get into contributing docs you realize that you don't need to ask
> permission to contribute. Clearly there are areas of greater need than
> others, but we have a larger problem with inertia than misdirected effort.
>
> It would help me if someone could spell out the substantive pros and cons
> of various licencing options for the docs to help me understand why there
> are benefits or aggravations with one licence versus another... I am trying
> to submit work which can be freely used by anyone, but I would prefer not to
> have someone take this and make money from publishing it without paying back
> to Scribus in some way.
>

Someone else will come with Licences explanations! :)

Could we say that the online help could much follow the menu structure of
the applications itself with a minimum of contextual information when
absolutely necessary. This means that we could treat this as an extended
"tooltip" type of info, describing more in-depth the features and what the
settings are all about. This would be useful to users but would definitely
make a very boring book nobody would buy (and nobody would publish).

For me, a publishable book is a whole different thing.

There is a need for online help because tooltips can't tell it all and some
features of Scribus are not as self-explanatory as they seem, especially for
newcomers in the DTP world. So, people need more and there they could have
it. We would then use a licence that would allow distros to ship the app and
the doc at the same time.

For more, including details about how to use the software and explanations
about printing and design, this is another story and, in my view, is a bit
out of the topic of an online help.

The advantage I see as having a straight definition of what is Online Help
and what should be in there is that it will allow better tracking
possibilities and it will be easier to tag anything as "current with version
x" or "outdated". For instance, ket's say we tag them with the version of
the app. If a feature has not been changed, we change the tag to the next
version of the app without change. If it was upgraded in a development
series, then it's updated too in the Online Help and gets tagged so
translators know about it. Hope this is clear.

Such Help would be easily translatable and updatable and we could use the
same Qt-linguist that is used for the GUI and it would pose not much licence
problems, I guess.

How does that sound?

Louis

> Greg
>
> [1] http://wiki.scribus.net/**canvas/Arbeiten_mit_**Musterseiten<http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Arbeiten_mit_Musterseiten>
>
>
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