Hi, The documentation team at Sun is currently reworking a number of the GNOME online reference manuals to ship with the GNOME on Solaris release. The Sun team is applying the guidelines that are in the draft GNOME Style Guide. As the style guide is still developing, things could still change, so we are holding off for a few more weeks before we translate all of the manuals we are working on. However, to test the validity of the approach, we have already translated one of our reworked manuals, the Font Selector manual, into the nine languages relevant for Sun. The document went through the translation process smoothly. We are making the manual and the language versions available at the following GNOME CVS location: gnome-docu/gdp/contrib/gfontsel By following the guidelines in the draft GNOME Style Guide, the writer produced a document that the translation team could translate quickly and easily. We welcome all comments regarding the English original and the language versions of this manual. In addition, you will notice that we have moved all non-technical information from the main body of the manual to a Title Page. As well as improving information accessibility and therefore usability, this strategy also facilitates rapid translation. Also, the GFDL calls for putting non-technical information into a Title Page. The tools do not have the functionality yet to put the Title Page link in the appropriate place, so attached to this mail is a dummy page that shows where the link would appear. Also attached is a suggested Title Page with some ideas for content. Again, we welcome comments about this proposed format. Notes ----- Please be aware of the following points when you review the Font Selector manual and the language versions: - The English language version of the manual is the only version that currently contains screen captures. The other language versions refer to screen captures but they are not included. - Nautilus ignores paragraph breaks within bulleted or numbered lists. You will notice some rather long paragraphs which should in fact be displayed as several paragraphs. We tried to address this as much as possible in the English version. - Nautilus has a problem with accented characters in Section 1 level titles and book titles. When Nautilus comes across an accent, the application finishes the title and places the rest of the title on the next paragraph. Nautilus does not have the same problem with Section 2 level titles. We are going to investigate thoroughly and file a bug. - The book title of the Swedish language version contains an accent so the complete title does not display. - There are three complete sentences in the German language version that were not translated to German. - The sgml code for the Asian locales is not indented but are one long string, which is a requirement for our translation tools. We were afraid to run our pretty tool on multi-byte locales in case it inserted a return in the middle of a multi-byte. - Some characters are displayed as "?" in zh_TW. This is a bug of the font selection algorithm of GNOME, not of translation. Bug filed several weeks ago. Hopefully, the translations demonstrate the benefits that the GNOME documentation project can achieve by writing to a well-defined style guide. As I said above, all comments are welcome, Pat Costello
Attachment:
gfontsel_toc.html
Description: gfontsel_toc.html
<!DOCTYPE ARTICLE PUBLIC "-//GNOME//DTD DocBook PNG Variant V1.1//EN"> <article id="index"> <!-- please do not change the id --> <artheader> <title>Title Page for the Font Selector Manual</title> <copyright> <year>2001</year> <holder>Sun Microsystems, Inc.</holder> </copyright> <legalnotice id="legalnotice"> <para>Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the <ulink url="gnome-help:fdl" type="help"><citetitle>GNU Free Documentation License</citetitle></ulink>, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license can be found <ulink url="gnome-help:fdl" type="help">here</ulink>.</para> <para>Many of the names used by companies to distinguish their products and services are claimed as trademarks. Where those names appear in any GNOME documentation, and those trademarks are made aware to the members of the GNOME Documentation Project, the names have been printed in capital letters or initial capital letters. </para> </legalnotice> <releaseinfo>Manual revision: Sun Microsystems version 1.0.</releaseinfo> </artheader> <sect1> <title>Developers</title> <para>This section contains information about developers. For example:</para> <para>The Font Selector utility was written by Andrew Veliath <email>andrewtv usa net</email>. </para> </sect1> <sect1 id="font-selector-authors"> <title>Documentation Authors</title> <para>This section can contain all information relevant to authors. For example: </para> <para>This manual was written by Sun Microsystems based on original material written by Alexander Kirillov <email>kirillov math sunysb edu</email>.</para> </sect1> <sect1 id="font-selector-support"> <title>Support</title> <para>Authors can include in this section any information that is relevant for support or support issues. This section can be useful for parties that need to customize the support approach.</para> </sect1> <sect1> <title>Product Licensing</title> <para>This section contains information and links relevant to licensing the product, rather than licensing the documentation.</para> </sect1> <sect1> <title>Liability</title> <para>At the moment there is no liability clause in the GFDL. The absence of such a clause poses a serious risk for all copyright holders, contributors and product shippers. A generic liability clause would be the best solution, which we could adapt to all online reference manuals. </para> </sect1> <sect1> <title>Warranty</title> <para>At the moment there is no warranty statement in the GFDL. The absence of such a clause poses a serious risk to all copyright holders, contributors and product shippers. The absence of a warranty declaration could be construed as providing a warranty of some sort or another. A generic warranty clause would be the best solution, which we could adapt to all online reference manuals. </para> </sect1> </article>