Re: Fixes to the manual page

[Peter Masiar <peter masiar yale edu>]

Hi Pavel, 

Quoting Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>:
> Since you volunteered to help with the documentation, here's something 
> where you can help.  The manual page of mc has a lot of grammatical errors 
> and is poorly phrased in many places.  
>
> There are also places where defects in the user interface are covered by
> the excessive description of workarounds.  That's a separate problem and
> cannot be fixed as easily.

OK. I definitely want to contribute to MC.
Where I should start, and how?

I guess, I need to download sources of docs, right? What wersion, where?

I am not exactly excited about reading all docs through... ;-)
But I can give it a try.

I guess docs are written using some special format, right?

Warning: Because english is not my first language, 
my grammar might be wrong, too. ;-)

In my work, we are using a wiki clone, TWiki (twiki.org) to collaborate
on creating documentation. It's basically browser-based web publishing
with user authorisation and version control.

If somebody will be interested, I can set up a twiki to publish
versions of docs, and any interested party can contribute/fix my errors.

Or, I can post proposed changes to this list (or the mc-dev list)
to be double-checked.

Nice with using twiki is, it contains diff, so it's equally easy to see
changes as they happened, final version, and edit a page to fix an error.

Ie. look at welcome page from twiki site:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/WelcomeGuest

You can see versions as they happened by clicking on [Diffs] link 
at the page bottom (warning: some changes are slight cosmetics), or here:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/rdiff/TWiki/WelcomeGuest

What do you (and other people) think?

--------------

Workarounds... They might possibly be described in separate document,
without cluttering main docs and confusing beginners, 
and possibly located on web.

I know original NC has all help files it needed, 
but (IMHO) these days it's hard to get a PC far away from net.
So it might have sense to have coming with application 
only very stable help pages, and expect that problems/tricks
are published on some more flexible media.

I have no idea how to organize translations... But again,
having basic stable pages in help, and workaround in english on web,
might be simplest and flexible solution.

Tel me where I am wrong. I am open to change my mind.. ;-)

-- 
Peter