Re: Commit (HEAD): Hack: default to en-US help files

On Sun, 26 Sep 2004, J.M. Maurer wrote:

> I can't think of a non-hackish way to fix this on the webserver as
> well...

I guess you could have a list of known locales and for unknown locales
provide a list of the available translations rather than trying to be too
clever about trying to automatically redirect people.

Ideally some complexity could be removed by considering the docs as
"en" rather than en-US or en-GB (so that is by language rather than by
locale?). I think i suggested something very similar in a bug report on
this.

> > Just curious, as this feature was originally meant for those who
> > get just the AbiWord.exe binary (or more specifically install AbiWord
> > and choose not to install the help files, but then try to access
> them),
> > anyone have an idea of how many people really use the web docs
> [invoked
> > from within AbiWord] and not locally installed ones?
>
> None of the linux packages include help files. Even not those coming
> from RedHat and the like.
>
> NB: imo we should move to DocBook for manuals, so the normal translation
> teams (from GNOME mostly) can work with us to help translate our docs...
> any reason NOT to do this?

If I recally correctly Abiword was used out of convenience rather than
requiring other tools and because Abiword could be used to generate most
of the formats that we would need (I'm still wondering how one would
generate PDF from the XSL:FO produced by Abiword and I never got around to
finishing my attempts to generate high quality PDF with hyperlinks through
LaTeX either). I think there might have been some hope that the DocBook
support in abiword might improve and make the transition seamless.

I dont think there was any real reason not to do it aside from the
complexity of setting up a good toolchain to produce all the formats and
the disadvantage of not dogfooding abiword in the process.

It sucks that Gnome still doesn't have a proper search tool for their
docs, it would actually be a step down to switch to Docbook+Yelp over our
current HTML with javascript based search.

If you can switch to DocBook as the master format and still have abiword
understand it and be part of the document processing toolchain so that we
dont lose any advantages of the existing system would be the win win
situation.

David Chart would know best as he was largely responsible for most of the
Documentation, I think he still lurks on the lists and uses Abiword for
his work but rarely posts.

- Alan
Received on Sun Sep 26 22:42:40 2004