[Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity

[S Page]

Summary: There seems to already be Sugar 0.84 content translated into
various languages on flossmanuals.net that someone could "remix" as
HTML and link to from the Browse activity's home page.

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 5:41 AM, Caroline Meeks <solutiongrove at gmail.com> wrote:

> We talked a bit about the Help Activity in Paris.  I've taken our discussion
> and written it up here:  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Help

I'm confused, is this related to the current OLPC Help (activity) in
OLPC release 8.2 which is hosted at git.sugarlabs.org, or a new
activity?

That page says "I think it should be a blurb about being a community
project, invitation to ask a question and a link to the manual in a
reader."
All that information belongs on the Browse home page!  The Goals
listed for the Help activity seem like the goals for a Sugar home
page.  Just have a "Getting help" section of the home page.
"A manual in a reader"?  Surely an HTML manual  in a browser is the way to go..

> Please take a look and edit this spec and start to think about how it should
> be implemented.

I don't understand Help as an activity, Help is useful info organized
in HTML pages.

The current OLPC help activity starts a hulahop.webview that displays
'help/XO_Introduction.html'  The benefit is it is a single-purpose
activity with its own '(?)' icon in the Home view, and it lacks some
browser chrome such as the location field and View menu.  But those
features become a confusing hindrance the moment you follow a link
from Help to an external web site.  Perhaps it would be better just to
put a link to the local help files on the Browse home page as I
suggest above, and/or provide a Journal entry for the local help
content, especially when and if Browse gets multiple tabs.  If the
distinction between activities and library content goes away then
there's even less reason for a standalone help activity.

If you have a connection to the net, you should probably just go to
the latest up-to-date online help for your software, e.g.
http://www.laptop.org/manual or
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar/8_4/TheJournal

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Bastien <bastienguerry at googlemail.com> wrote:
> If "translating" equates to "translating the flossmanuals" I think it's
> worth anyway, whether these pages goes into the Help activity or not.

The Flossmanuals.net site seems currently available in English, nl
(Dutch), and fa (Persian), but it can host translations in other
languages, see http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals/TranslatingAManual
.  I just realized that parts of the Sugar manual have been
translated, e.g.
http://translate.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar_es/WhatIsAnActivity
!!

> Idea: why not have a mediawiki_syntax2sugar_display converter?  Then we
> could create a Help activity based on content from the Sugar wiki.  Or a
> Tutorials activity based on all tutorials from the wiki.  Or others
> WikiBrowse activities based on other slices of the WikiPedia.

Surely by "sugar display" you just mean HTML?  In which case there are
lots of tools to turn MediaWiki into HTML, several of which have been
used for OLPC content and activities.  Check out
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wikislices
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wikibooks
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/InfoSlicer

Note that the FlossManuals site uses TWiki, not MediaWiki.  There are
pros and cons to this.  It seems incredibly simple to use
http://en.flossmanuals.net/remix to export as HTML; I assume that's
how someone created the current OLPC Help activity and online manual
and PDF.  But the division between the documentation and the wiki is
unfortunate, and could be avoided if say wiki.sugarlabs.org had a
Category:Sugar_help that people carefully maintain and occasionally
turn into a Help manual using MediaWiki tools.

MediaWiki's history and [Compare selected revisions] can help
dedicated bilingual translators keep a translation in sync with
updates to a "master" page.  E.g. click on the "cambios" link in the
translation header of http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Participate/lang-es .
I don't know if FlossManuals/TWiki has advanced template support to do
something similar.

People are already working on Sugar/8_4 (sic) files on flossmanuals,
there was discussion of a Sugar 0.84 manual in
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/2009-March/thread.html
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_help points users to
http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar , but I believe this is for Sugar
0.82.  (A while ago I complained that version info is not available in
flossmanuals along with many other presentation and style problems.)

Maybe someone can periodically create a Remix of the current state of
these "8_4" chapters and turn it into library content, an activity
(maybe create a Sugar_8_4 branch of the existing
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/help ), and/or upload it to a
directory on sugarlabs.org.  Maybe someone already has; people seem to
be working on stuff that isn't noted on the obvious wiki pages like
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_help  and
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Manuals .

Cheers,
--
=S Page