[Sugar-devel] Potential volunteer offering technical writing

[Chris Leonard]

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 1:12 AM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:19 PM, Martin Langhoff
> <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 6:25 PM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> In any refresh of the XO manual (Help Activity),  I would very much
>>> appreciate if some structural choices could be made to facilitate the
>>> internationalization of the text
>>
>> Agreed on the general goal. My understanding is that the Help activity
>> is assembled from content from several manuals about sugar and
>> activities, created and edited at FLOSS Manuals.
>>
>> I suspect that FLOSS Manuals has a means to maintain translated
>> versions, not sure how well it works, but several existing manuals
>> offer alternative language versions.
>>
>> Maybe the FLOSS manuals platforms is terminally borked in this regard,
>> I honestly hope not. Because Pootle is not suited for this style of
>> documentation -- we sure want something wiki-ish that handles
>> paragraphs, tables, embedded images...

(earlier message sent prematurely)

I need to spend a little bit of time on FLOSSManuals,  I'd heard
something about hem incorporating booki

 http://www.booki.cc/

but I have not investigated it extensively since then to see how much
of an improvement it is with regards to L10n.

L10n of long-form content is an area where I think there are some
excellent bits and pieces, but I'm not convinced that there is a
really nice end-to-end solution yet.  I think very highly of
FLOSSManuals as a book publishing platform, but was less than
impressed with it's L10n workflow.  I am happy that several of the
Sugar OLPC boks have been translated, but these have been time-focused
efforts requiring a lot of coordination and not amenable to the slower
accumulation of collaborative work that characterizes Poolte L10n
work.

I like also wikislicing as a content collection method and Wikimedia's
WikiBook effort has some superb features with respect to content
collection and publishing.  To the extent that orthologous articles
exist across wikis it can also address L10n, essentially by slicing
"pre-localized" content.

Unfortunately, while the PDF output from WikiBooks is quite
beautifully formatted, it's size is large and PDFs are not that easy
to edit after the fact.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:TamTamSuite_collection.pdf

The ,odt output option from WikiBooks is easier to edit, but I think
it has real deficiencies in formatting, and IMHO, is frankly ugly.

However, both of these formats produce rather large files compared to
simple HTML and an HTML output option is not currently available.

My reasoning on requesting availability of a plain text version is
that facilitates bringing the strings to the localizer, instead of
forcing you to bring the localizer to the strings (and a new tool).
Admittedly, this has its; own flaws and requires more substantial
post-processing to get a nicely formatted product.

The ideal all-singing, all-dancing long-form L10n tool with content
management system features and e-publishing features may be out there,
but I haven't seen it yet.  I do welcome others to join in the
exploration of the various options and techniques for cobbling
together a workflow that optimally meets our needs, but most of all, I
encourage thinking about i18n / L10n in all aspects of our work.

cjl