[Qgis-community-team] Platform for documentation

[Otto Dassau]

Am Tue, 23 Nov 2010 21:08:51 +0000
schrieb Bogus Zaba <bogus at bogzab.plus.com>:

> MORREALE Jean Rocwrote :
> Subject: Re: [Qgis-community-team] Collaborative platform for the
> 	documentation
> On 11/23/2010 05:00 PM, qgis-community-team-request at lists.osgeo.org wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:58:19 +0100
> > From: MORREALE Jean Roc<jr.morreale at enoreth.net>
> > Subject: Re: [Qgis-community-team] Collaborative platform for the
> > 	documentation
> > To:qgis-community-team at lists.osgeo.org
> > Message-ID:<4CEBF2AB.3090906 at enoreth.net>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> >
> > Le 23/11/2010 14:40, Otto Dassau a écrit :
> >> >  Paolo was even thinking about writing a QGIS plugin for the
> >> > translation of the docs - maybe this could be a solution, too.
> > I don't think it would be a good to make our own tool for that purpose
> > as it would limit the help we could get from other projects on this
> > matter.
> >
> >> >  a) Find something to use instead of latex, that is easier to learn
> >> > and can produce nice html and PDF files.
> > The use of restructured text/Docutils would make it possible to to keep
> > a possible latex output while gaining others.
> >
> I agree here - surely we should not be writing custom QGIS tools to do a
> generic documentation job to which many teams have given much thought and
> have developed a variety of solutions. Restructured text/Docutils looks
> very promising from the point of view of simplicity (compared with LaTex)
> of writing, but is not intrinsically "collaborative" and might still
> involve us checking out and submitting svn source material. OK by me, but
> maybe not ideal for getting more people involved who would prefer
> web-based authoring toolsets.

AFAIK we probably will have to use some versioning system anyway, no matter
what tool we use for documentation. I don't think that this is the biggest
problem, since there is turtoise for Windows, or am i wrong? 

For now I think for writing the english manual we need something that is easy
to write (simpler then latex, esp. to add tables and figures) without too
complex syntax and produces nice looking html and PDF. With a WYSIWYG editor
would be perfect :). I don't think this has to be a online tool?

And then we need some online tool that is able to read the english text and
that compares changes between the old and new version, so people know what
they have to translate.
 
Is there anything you know that is worth having a closer look?

> Also whatever choice is made there will be a big effort needed to move
> existing sources to a new system.

yes, it would mean a lot of work. But I believe it's worth the effort, if
this motivates more people to contribute to the docs.

 Otto

> Bogus
> 
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