[Sugar-devel] French Help Activity

[Gary C Martin]

On 12 Jun 2009, at 18:02, David Farning wrote:

> This might be a ridiculous question....
>
> Are the strong reasons for maintaining a help activity rather than
> just pointing users to a pdf of the help/manual file which is opened
> with the standard pdf reader?

I think the whole help document as a single PDF would be a likely out  
of memory issue for XO level hardware, and thus hard to navigate. The  
existing Help html format breaks up the document into pages that don't  
need to be processed unless you click through (Navigating deep into a  
complex PDF even if you don't view the initial pages seems to get  
quite slow).

FWIW, I do have a somewhat related ticket open for Soas:

	http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/840

And did recently comment in a previous email about the possibility of  
breaking up the Help document into sections/chapters and adding them  
as PDF's to the Journal, with good tags, and descriptions for easy  
searching of material directly in the Journal.

The only real downside is if you relied heavily on inter chapter links  
(fine if your using links between pages of one specific PDF, but not  
between PDFs).

Regards,
--Gary

> I just wonder if the extra effort in maintaining localized help
> activities is worth it at this point.  When we have more resources it
> might be worth it.
>
> david
>
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 9:15 AM, LASKE, Lionel (C2S)<LLASKE at c2s.fr>  
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Gary, hi Tomeu,
>>
>> I've just explored the Help.Activity directory.
>> Your answers perfectly make sense for me.
>>
>> We target 0.82 so I just need to repackage the zip file with the  
>> localized content to have a working French Help Activity.
>>
>> Thanks a lot for your "Help" ;-)
>>
>> Best regards from France.
>>
>>        Lionel.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Message d'origine-----
>> De : Gary C Martin [mailto:gary at garycmartin.com]
>> Envoyé : vendredi 12 juin 2009 15:41
>> À : LASKE, Lionel (C2S)
>> Cc : Sugar Devel; Tomeu Vizoso; localization list olpc
>> Objet : Re: [Sugar-devel] French Help Activity
>>
>> On 12 Jun 2009, at 11:27, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 21:42, LASKE, Lionel (C2S)<LLASKE at c2s.fr>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> But of course, we want to go further. Since the last SugarCamp
>>>> Paris, we
>>>> dream to build the Help activity in French.
>>>>
>>>> I know there was already a talk on the Help activity recently on  
>>>> this
>>>> mailing list but it was more about maintainability issue.
>>>>
>>>> My point of view is slightly different today: is there a way to do
>>>> quickly a
>>>> "one shot" build of the Help Activity in French ?
>>>
>>> I think that should be doable, have you already looked the  
>>> sources? It
>>> may be a simple matter of changing the html files and the bundle id,
>>> then rezipping. See here for more info about bundles:
>>>
>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Almanac/Activity_Bundles
>>>
>>> I'm not sure who is maintaining Help right now. Would be good to  
>>> hear
>>> other opinions.
>>
>> I'm not sure what version of Sugar Lionel is targeting, but I've just
>> tested Help-10 on 0.84 (in SoaS and sugar-jhbuild), and it currently
>> fails to launch due to changes in the  new version of hulahop.
>>
>> If Help-10 is just to run on 0.82 builds you should be able to get
>> away with just replacing the html content inside the Help bundles
>> folder (called help). Just to be non-standard with the rest of the
>> world, the default start page seems to be called "help/
>> XO_Introduction.html" but it is defined on line 35 of helpactivity.py
>> so if needed you can change it to point to some other start page.
>>
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Tomeu
>>>
>>>> Any suggestion will be welcome.
>>>>
>>>> Best regards from France.
>>>>
>>>>                 Lionel.
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
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