[kde-doc-english] KDE: Documentation (Quanta, Konqueror, others)

[Philip Rodrigues]

Hi Jeffrey,

I don't know if Lauri already got back to you, but in case not...

> Anyway-- I'm contacting you about my interest in helping to author, or
> edit, KDE User Manual / Web-accessible documentation or, in general, any
> written material needed by KDE development. I first recognized, with all
> due respect and understanding, the apparent deficiency in authorship
> while reading some of the Quanta Plus docs. While the practical is
> basically served, the text tends to be incomplete, or even not well
> formatted at times. I'm confident that I could take the existing
> documentation, rewrite those sections for which I have sufficient
> knowledge to amend any errors, and even venture to author that essential
> material which might have yet to be documented at all.

Working on quanta docs would be great. I guess the easiest way to get started 
with this would be to get the existing DocBook source out of SVN (the KDE 
source code repository), and you can start working on the editorial-type 
things. To get the documentation from SVN (aka subversion), you'll need the 
following command:
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/KDE/3.5/kdewebdev/doc/quanta
This will create a quanta/ directory with the DocBook source of the quanta 
documentation in it. The main file is called index.docbook, and it will use 
the other .docbook files to produce the full document.

As I've mentioned, our documentation is maintained in DocBook format. However, 
you don't have to learn the format immediately - you should be able to get on 
with editing existing text just by "working around" the tags (things like 
<this>). When it comes to writing new content, you can write in plain text, 
and send your text to the list - we'll add the necessary DocBook formatting, 
and commit the updates back to SVN.

So, just to summarize, here's how I suggest you could get started:
1. Download (the jargon is "checkout") the quanta docs from SVN
2. Make some editing changes in the DocBook files, ignoring the tags.
3. Send your changes to kde-doc-english at kde.org, where we'll pick them up and 
commit them
4. Goto 2 :-). That is, you don't need to do everything in one go, just do a 
section or two, send along your changes to the list, then you can start 
working on another section.

Of course, if some other way of working suits you, we can do that too.

I'll send a message to Andras Mantia and Danny Allen, who've both recently 
done some work on the Quanta docs, explaining that you're interested in 
helping, and to see if they have any tips.

Last thing, some resources you might find useful:
http://l10n.kde.org/docs/doc-primer/index.html - the KDE documentation primer, 
with general information about getting started, and writing docs
You can also find us on #kde-docs on the irc.freenode.net IRC network.

Sorry about the length, I hope the information is useful, but if you have any 
questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Regards,
Philip
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-doc-english/attachments/20061125/114137e1/attachment.sig