Subject: Thoughts and suggestions on the help files
From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Mon Aug 14 2000 - 13:10:15 CDT
[I've already sent this twice, but it didn't show up on the mailing list.
Perhaps because of the attachment? Well, I'm resending it; this time without any
attachments]
The AbiWord help files are currently difficult to update (you'll have to update
all files if you want to add a new one or change the title of an old one
(because of the TOC/navigation bar)) and translate (content mixed with
presentation and no way of knowing what has changed in the orignal files).
I think the way to go, is to use XML for storing the help files, and then
convert them HTML (and/or other formats). DocBook could be used, though it's
perhaps too complicated and not specific enough for our needs(?). Another
solution would be to come up with our own XML format. I've uploaded a simple
example <URL: http://home.no.net/huftis/abiword/files/why.xml >.
One useful feature is the 'changed' attribute (see the first paragraph).
Whenever a change is made to part of the document (e.g. a paragraph, a
list-item, a heading or a name), this should be used. This makes it very easy
for translators to see which part of the translation needs updating.
We can use XSLT to convert the files to (X)HTML, and perhaps even PDF, using
LaTeX (see <URL: http://home.no.net/huftis/abiword/files/abihelp.pdf >, which
was convert to the LaTeX format using XSLT, and then to PDF using pdflatex).
Any thoughts on this?
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