[udig-devel] Re: User guide's and help system's future

[Matthias Basler <Matthias.Basler@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jody Garnett wrote:

> I have set up a series of wiki spaces (EN, FR, DE) for each language
> that seems to be of interest to people at the moment.  The idea is to
> have the spaces have the same "layout" in terms of page name.
> [...] And generate a Table of Contents (TOC)
> file based on the common page names (HOME, Getting Started, etc...).
>
> Here is why I think this will work
> 1) The page name is not displayed by the Online Help viewer
> 2) We only have to generate one file by hand
> 3) It allows the community to edit, and comment on the documentation,
> provide support for new languages etc...
  [...]
> The page names are not gauranteed, I am wanting to set up this as a
> convention. And alternative may be to make a TOC page for each language,
> that we could cut and paste from.

Hmm, different people will probably prefer different approaches.
Some points to consider:

- My current translation efforts in Eclipse were quite fast, because editing the
html source code in Eclipse works quite well for somebody knowing the html
syntax. Probably It would have taken me a lot longer to do that on a wiki (From
my experience on Wikipedia etc. wikis are a bit sluggish.)
- Editing the wiki requires a constant internet connection. :-(
but...
- For other people it's more convenient to use wikis because they don't need to
install Eclipse to help and don't need to understand html.
- Having the wikis up to date allows to have translations already available in
the times between releases.

- You will maybe have noticed that I took some freedom in the translation,
meaning that the German tutorial is a bit more compact since I put the contents
of several related "mini html pages" onto one bigger. I consider such freedom as
important for translators. Working with a "page name" convention would not allow
this.
So I definitely prefer the option to create slightly different TOCs for each
language as is currently the case for German.

- The question whether translation should be done continually (by any wiki users
coming across uDig) or only preceeding a new release is not easy to answer
frommy point of view.
Probably the best solution is to allow constant editing in all languages, but
preceeding a release some native speaker MUST then check each languages for
logical and linguistic consistency, for topicality and for completeness before
they get used as a help system ... bear in mind that the "standards" for a wiki
page and for a help system in a distributed "professional" piece of software are
imho quite different.

(P.S. Plugin Help link didn't work right now. UDIG server seems to be down as
usual at Friday/Saturday European time.)

Richard Gould wrote:
> The issue can be avoided with a web interface though.
> See this website:
> http://home.unilang.org/main/translations2.php?state=list&lng=de

An interesting concept, indeed.

> What I would really
> like to see is a closer linking between Java source code and properties
> files. For example if you hold control and click on a field or method in
> Eclipse, it will take you to that field or method declaration. It would
> be nice if you could do this for property keys.

Yes, that would be helpful.
I start thinking about sending a "translater's wish list" to Eclipse.

-----
Richard Gould wrote:
> Should I make a psf file for the fragments? Is there actually interest
> for that?

Personally I don't reqire one.

-----
Richard Gould wrote concerning the splash screen:
> Well, it works outside of Eclipse, after a release has been made. I
> can't get it to work inside Eclipse. It has to do with the configuration
> file used during runtime. The default one generated by Eclipse does not
> search the nl1 fragments, just the base ui plug-in.

OK, that explains why it didn't work for me in Eclipse. Thanks.

Matthias Basler
c9bama@xxxxxxxxxxx

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