Re: Writing Gnome documentation?

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

Thomas,

On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 03:31, Thomas D. Ward wrote:
> Hello, list.
> I was planning on writing two documents for gnopernicus such as a cvs
> installation guide and a gnopernicus quick reference users guide, and I was
> wondering who I would contact to get involved with documentation projects.

Fantastic! Another documenter for GNOME. :-)

The general "writing documentation" list is gnome-doc-list gnome org  To
subscribe and get list information and such, it is the URL as for
gnome-accessibility-list, except using gnome-doc-list as the list name.

On that list you can get help with any problems you are having with the
writing process itself. We tend to use DocBook-XML for marking up
documents in GNOME, but if you want to write in HTML or text or
something similar, there are people on that list who can then convert
the document for you.

It is also probably a very good idea to get in contact with the
gnopernicus maintainers and coordinate your activities with them.
Sometimes maintainers have some documentation sitting around that they
are happy to pass onto keen documenters to use as a starting point or
the like. This will also make it easy for your documents to be folded
into the gnopernicus package itself, if that makes sense and is
agreeable to you.

Finally, if you are comfortable using IRC, there is a #docs channel on
irc.gnome.org with a few people usually logged in (particularly during
US daylight and evening hours).

Hopefully that gives you a start. The short version is: start writing
whatever you like and when/if you get stuck or want to incorporate what
you have done into GNOME, contact gnome-doc-list gnome org and explain
what you need. Also, do not forget that there are many eager testers on
this mailing list, so early versions of anything you write can be tested
for practicality just by posting something here.

Cheers,
Malcolm