Re: nautilus documentation

[Eric Baudais <baudais okstate edu>]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 10:41:33PM -0700, Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> I know that many people have been really frustrated by the nautilus 
> documentation and its non-availability in sgml format.
> 
> Some people might have noticed that I have commited an HTML version
> of this in nautilus cvs. This html version does not match the GNOME
> documentation output and it is extremly bad looking. The screenshots
> are ugly (bad resizing and stuff...)...
> 
> Hopefully, all this will change soon.
> 
> Our current native format is framemaker and Eazel writer is doing all
> his work using this format. It has been assigned to me the task
> of doing a conversion from framemaker to SGML and I am more than happy
> to be able to fix this problem instead of having to go with the framemaker
> format.

Have you thought about having your tech writer use LyX or something that would
make a friendly SGML markup that would only need a few revisions.  I think
that this would be a better solution.

> However, I am pretty much overloaded by work these days so, this mail is 
> a call for volunteers.
> 
> What needs to be done:
> 
>         - redo all screenshots so that we have png versions which 
>         actually look good.
> 
>         - port the frammaker files from framemaker to sgml.
> 
> It is clear to me that I will be unable to do item 1 properly since I 
> really lack time.
> Item 2 requires either that someone with a perfect knowledge of the sucky
> proprietary software named "Framemaker+SGML" writes the proper conversion
> tools to convert the current stuff and hands edit the output to do the
> final tagging or that someone does a manual marking of an SGML file by hand.
> I completely lack the knowledge to do the work in framemaker and this would
> require a lot of hand-editing anyway. I will thus head for solution 2 which
> will require something like 1 or 2 days of work.

I would think that it would be easier to have the document in plain text.  
I think that would cause less confusion for the person doing the markup.

> I will not be able to start working on this before the begening of next week
> but I will do so asap. Thus, anyone who has a copy of framemaker is free
> to mail me to help around next week: I need to coordinate with our writer so
> that we actually convert the right version of the manual.
> 
> Then, everyone will be able to comment on the manual and review and send 
> patches :)

I will look forward to looking at it.

Eric Baudais