[kde-doc-english] Contributing

[Raphael Langerhorst]

On Tuesday 22 February 2005 16:47, Francis G wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have just been reading the KDE Documentation pages. I have often
> been thinking of a way to give back and contribute to something
> that has been consistently so prosperous and beneficial to myself,
> but I was neither a programmer nor any sort of Linux guru. I am
> adventurous with my Operating System, but perhaps average on my
> general knowledge of it.
>
> Nevertheless, it seems to me that I could potentially be a help in
> some way by:
> * Writing wider documentation for the whole of KDE (like the User
> Guide, or this document).
> * Proofreading and/or updating documentation to ensure that it is
> correct and up-to-date.
>
> I'm a voracious and discursive reader, and it's perhaps fair to say
> that I'm a pedant when it comes to English spelling and syntax (I
> noticed a few minor errors in the Documentation itself; I'll point
> them out if you don't mind my doing so).
>
> My native tongue is Modern Greek, but I have progressed somewhat
> since I moved to England some twelve years ago. My Greek remains
> terribly crippled (broken), but my English is more than reasonable.
>
> Please do let me know if there's any way in which I might be of
> some use; either in writing documentation or by proofreading
> (perhaps my preferred option, though they would both suit me).
>
> Kindest thoughts,
> Francis Giannaros.

Hello Francis,

it is always very nice to hear from people who want to give something 
back to the community.

There are certainly many options for you to contribute, one option I 
can offer you is:

Proofreading some KOffice (http://www.koffice.org) manuals. Some are 
also a bit outdated. So apart from proofreading it would also be 
great if you check if what is in the documentation still applies to 
the current state of the application. Some of the manuals have 
particular maintainers, like KWord, KSpread and Kivio. Others have no 
particular maintainer and are likely a bit outdated, so they could 
use some attention. Here is a list of components of KOffice (some not 
yet officially released, but available in CVS HEAD - the upcoming 1.4 
release):

These components are available in the 1.3 release:

KWord           Mike
KPresenter
KSpread         Raphael
KChart
Kivio           Ben
Kugar  [help very welcome here, both development and documentation]
Karbon14 [help very welcome here, both development and documentation]
KFormula
KoShell (KOffice Workspace)

As you can see, KWord, KSpread and Kivio is maintained, in particular 
Kugar and Karbon14 would need both development and documentation(?) 
help and proofreading.


These components will be available in KOffice 1.4 which will be 
released in about two months, you should contact the 
koffice-devel at kde.org mailinglist if you want to contribute to one of 
them:

Kexi - a database frontend (http://www.kexi-project.org)
Krita - a pixmap graphics application, like Gimp or Photoshop


This one is still in heavy development, so no documentation is yet 
required (things still change a lot):

KPlato - Planning and Project Management Tool


The general KOffice handbook is also very outdated, but I think I will 
work on it myself in the near future:

KOffice/general
KOffice FAQ


Please let me know if you want to contribute to one of the manuals or 
simply proofread them (I try to keep track of who works on which part 
of the KOffice documentation).

And welcome on board! Please feel free to ask everything you need, 
also stupid questions, etc.

And ONE important thing: you DON'T need to know docbook, you can 
simply write stuff in plain text and send it to this mailing list. 
There are many people here that can convert it to docbook very 
quickly. But if you are mainly proofreading then you probably don't 
write much new stuff anyway...

If you want to work on KOffice documentation, you should probably best 
check out the KOffice module from CVS (see 
http://developer.kde.org/source/anoncvs.html ) as it contains the 
most up-to-date documentation (of course). Still you can just read 
what you find in the Help Center as well.

The documentation in the CVS checkout is in koffice/doc

Best wishes, and welcome again :)
Raphael