[Sugar-devel] Flossmanuals?

[David Farning]

Have you pinged the FM mailing list at
http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net .
They are usually pretty helpful.

The biggest reason for leaning on FM is that they have a good
reputation for creating usable end user documentation.  Traditionally,
documentation is one of the weakest parts of open source projects,
because no one every gets around to writing it.

Unless someone really motivated and really talented comes on board, I
don't SL being able to create the quality of content FM creates in the
near term.

I think there are about 10 translations of the Sugar manuals in various states.

david

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Bastien<bastienguerry at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> writes:
>
>> Some points:
>>
>>   • It's what we use already. ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it")
>
> I think it is broken for some purposes.
>
> We couldn't have a decent PDF for the french translation because
> of encoding issues.
>
> Is anyone using flossmanuals to translate Sugar documentation into
> another language?
>
>>   • It supports easy exporting to a variety of formats
>
> I'm aware of PDF export - what other formats?
>
>>   • FLOSSManuals has infrastructure for print-on-demand dead-tree
>>   publishing
>
> Ok.
>
>>   • FM's software is explicitly designed for the task
>
> Well, see above about PDF export.
>
>>   • FM supports easy remixing of content and creation of custom books
>>   pooling from a variety of on-site sources
>
> Maybe I just miss a nice tutorial about this.
>
>>   • There is a community of tech writers who use it.
>>
>> More importantly, what are the benefits/reasons-in-favor of changing to a
>> "simple wiki"?
>
> - Sugar Labs already uses a wiki;
>
> - The source format of the wiki is easier to export into a variety of
>  formats (including .odt and .pdf);
>
> - The wiki allows better co-writing than flossmanuals;
>
> - Nothing prevents people to export from the wiki to flossmanuals
>  (e.g. to benefit from its "print-on-demand" feature) but it is
>  hard to export from flossmanuals to other formats.
>
> My point is not about whether Sugar Labs should use flossmanuals or not,
> it's about using it as a native format for documentation.
>
> I think the native format should be:
>
> - easy to integrate into Sugar;
> - easy to export into lots of formats.
>
> --
>  Bastien
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