[Sugar-devel] [Localization] Help activity

[David Farning]

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 12:49 AM, S Page <skierpage at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

For a little background.

Last fall, the Sugar manual, at Floss Manuals, was written and bundled
as the OLPC help activity very quickly.

The fact that it progress as quickly as it did was due to the work of
a few people;  Walter as a content writer, Anne Gentle as the document
maintainer, and Seth and Brian who rolled the manual into the help
activity.

Long story short - Help was thrown together at the last minute.

> 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.

At the time OLPC was bound by tighter constraints than Sugar Labs is.

> 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.

flossmanuals is a site that uses a specific methodology and toolkit to
crank out manuals in one week sprints.  If we want to avoid
reinventing the wheel we need to determine how to effectily use the FM
output.  FM has a decent translation toolkit at
http://translate.flossmanuals.net/write .

> 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 .

This is the idea.  We just need someone to do the remixing and bundling:(

david

> Cheers,
> --
> =S Page
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