[kde-doc-english] aKademy mini-report

[Philip Rodrigues]

We've managed to make a good start on quite a few topics here at aKademy, 
especially some relating to the technology we're using. I'm writing it up for 
two reasons: firstly, so that those who aren't here are kept in the loop, and 
secondly because we need more people to help. If you're interested in any of 
these (or know someone else who is :-), reply, and we'll fill in any other 
details you need:

I've made quite a bit of progress with PDFs, thanks to the workstations here 
and the ability to have a full SVN checkout. Out of 257 handbooks in the 
official KDE modules (ie, not extragear, review, playground), there's only one 
that is not working for a reason that I don't understand. You all noticed 
that I  spammed the list with bug reports for all missing screenshots that 
are referenced in the documentation, since this breaks PDF generation. Next 
step is making a professional, clean but distinctive KDE style for the PDF 
output, followed by work on translation.

Rainer, Lauri and I have worked out how to implement linking between docs in a 
way that solves the two issues with such a system:
1. It must work in the locally installed documentation (using help:/ links) 
and the online documentation (using http://docs.kde.org links).
2. The target doc might not be installed on the user's system. We need to 
offer the online version as a fallback in this case.
To get this fully working, we will need to do a little C++ coding, and some 
PHP scripting. If you'd like to help with either of these, please get in 
touch.

Lauri has done some work on lowering the bar for entry to docs: If you have a 
branch checkout later than  455839, you may have noticed that the footer to 
the page contains a feedback link. We'll see how this works, and if it's 
successful, consider extending the system, perhaps to something like the 
PostgreSQL online docs' comment system.

I added the standard www.kde.org access keys 
(http://www.kde.org/media/accesskeys.php) to the docs.kde.org stylesheet. I 
just need to test a bit further and co-ordinate with Rainer to get this onto 
the site.

Lauri and Frerich have some tools to generate and use entities for the 
standard menu entries, etc. This will mean a lot less writing standard text 
in the docs.

Sander Koning has done some work on automating screenshot taking using the 
KDExecutor programme, and Kurt Pfeifle (and Fabian Franz?) has helped get 
this working in concert with FreeNX, which will again lower the bar for 
entry, I hope.

Several people from the worlds of coding, usability, evangelism and docs got 
together to discuss and present demos for improvements to whatsthis help and 
its integration with docs. I think I'll save this for another message, since 
it could be a bit long, plus I don't yet have a copy of the neat demos.

Rainer presented his work so far on creating multimedia presentations, ie 
"moving screenshots." These have a lot of potential for both docs and 
promotion (see http://features.physos.net/).

That's all I can think of for the moment. Apologies to anyone if I missed 
anything out - it was certainly not deliberate.

Regards,
Philip
-- 
KDE Documentation Team: http://i18n.kde.org/doc
KDE Documentation Online: http://docs.kde.org