[Sugar-devel] French Help Activity

[Gary C Martin]

Hi David,

On 13 Jun 2009, at 02:58, David Farning wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com>  
> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Was that the collections post/thread a little while ago?  I remember
> skimming it.

There were a few emails on "Dynamic content collections for Browse  
Journal" if that's what you were referring to, but that was more about  
the 0.86 roadmap having Browse able to resume zipped up sites/pages  
(acting as a replacement/more-useful incarnation of the old .xol  
library bundle concept for html based content).

In the "ASLO Suggestion" thread, Sean did ask about getting the Help  
activity uploaded to ASLO (but the content is out of date and the  
Activity only works in 0.82 due to hulahop version changes in core). I  
did mention perhaps breaking up the Help into well tagged PDF sections/ 
chapters that could just go in the Journal http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-June/006382.html

Thinking about it some more, having smaller tightly focused documents,  
rather than a monster manual, might be more scalable for us (Journal  
for easy searching of all the content, smaller separate docs more easy  
to keep updated and can be out of sync with Sugar release cycles).

> Sorry if I stole your idea.

Steal away (if it could ever 'mine' in the first place)! :-)

Regards,
--Gary

> david
>
>> 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