Re: Accelerator and terminology guides?

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Christian Rose wrote:

> Calum Benson wrote:
> > The GNOME documentation team have a glossary list, which is at least
> > partially translated into several languages and would be a good starting
> > point for a simpler UI terminology list.  I'm sure it's available online
> > somewhere, but I can't remember where, maybe Dan can point us at it?
>
> >From http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp/styleguide.html:
> " The GNOME Documentation Style Guide  is the primary style guide for
> writing GNOME user documentation. Many parts of it are also applicable
> to GNOME developer documentation. It includes general information about
> documentation goals and usability, discussion of audience and tone,
> information on how to write translatable and clear documents, and a
> detailed word list so that authors can use consistent terminology.
>
> Status: The GNOME Documentation Style Guide is being written by a team
> of writers from the GDP and Sun Microsystems including John Fleck,
> Alexander Kirillov, Pat Costello, and Eugene O'Connor. When the first
> draft is ready, it will be posted on these pages for review by the GDP.
> The chapter on usability is being released before the rest of the
> document for comments and review."
>
> So it seems it is not yet ready.
> Anyway, consistent documentation does hardly help if the applications
> themselves are inconsistent with terminology, and that's why I was
> looking forward to a style guide with included terminology
> recommendations.

Wow - You guys are fast.  I just created that web page yesterday and it
hasn't even been announced yet.  Anyway, the first draft of the style
guide (with the word list) should be released in a couple weeks for
discussion and review.  There is another word list used by translators
which is in CVS somewhere but I think the one which will be part of the
style guide is what you are looking for here.

Generally, the word list in the documentation style guide should also be
used for the UI and the web pages.  The UI team should work with the
documentation group to improve the word list in the documentation style
guide.  I don't think seperate word lists will be necessary, and it could
lead to contradictions.  We probably just want to have the UI Style Guide
refer to the Documentation Style Guide for the sake of terminology.  This
is certainly subject to discussion however.

Dan