Re: Introduction

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, Zoe J. Robinson wrote:

> Hello.
> 
> The 'GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation' suggested sending
> an e-mail to this list on joining, so I am.
> 
> Hi everyone.  I was pointed in this direction by the author of PAN,
> after I volunteered to write the documentation for that program.  Is
> anyone currently doing that, if not I'm here to give it a go.
> 
> That's about it, really.  So, um, bye!
> 
> Zoë

Hi Zoë,

Looking in the DocTable, nobody was signed up to work on this document.  
So, I just added you as the writer.

Browsing through the Pan source in GNOME cvs, I see that there are some
developer resources under pan/doc/ along with an HTML version of a FAQ.  
The convention is to put developer docs in <app>/doc/ and user docs (which
get installed under $prefix/share/gnome/help/<app>/<locale>/) under
<app>/help/<locale>.  User docs have to be installed in this path for the
GNOME help browser to find them.  If you convert the FAQ into
DocBook/SGML, I would put it in a new directory (along with the Pan Manual
you are writing): pan/help/C/.  

Several of us recently updated the GDP templates on the web page:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp/templates.html
So they should work fine with Nautilus and have the latest version of
the legalnotice section.  (Note the links in the legalnotice section will
seem broken if you are not using Nautilus with the CVS HEAD version of
gnome-core, but they will work fine with GNOME 1.4.)  Feel free to take
some liberty on how you lay out the document.  The templates are more of a
guide on how to do the markup than on how to structure your
document. (Possibly with the exception of the last couple sections on bug
reporting, authors, and licenses.)

If you decide to convert the FAQ to DocBook, take a look at
gnome-docu/gnome-faq/users-faq-1.2/ to see how one uses the <qanda*>
tags.

Thanks for the help and welcome to the GDP.

Dan