[libreoffice-l10n] Re: l10n process, en_US version, Help files

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
I am fairly sure the Documentation Team is NOT up to doing this but
perhaps with a little help they might be?  They wont be able to do any
of the coding, however easy it is, but the skeleton help-page sounds
like something they might be really good at.  They recently got into
doing the wiki-Faq so they might be less scared of working around
coding tags and such nowadays.  Would it be a good idea to give them a
proposal of what might be required?
Regards from
Tom :)

On 18 December 2013 10:19, Caolán McNamara <caolanm at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-12-11 at 17:19 +0100, Sophie wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> This mail is posted to the dev list and the l10n list, please follow up
>> on the l10n list.
>>
>> I would like to open a discussion on the l10n workflow, the quality of
>> the en_US version and the Help files. All is linked and I would like to
>> discuss how we can improve the process here. I'm sure that having a
>> better understanding between the l10n process and the dev process should
>> help us to improve things :) So here is a proposal, it's a bit long,
>> sorry for that.
>>
>> *Before updating Pootle:
>> - it's important for l10n team to know the approx load of work that will
>> be needed to achieve the whole work. Time between beta1 and rc1 is short
>> and that will help to better organize this time between translation and
>> proof reading.
>> - depending also on the type of changes, we could use different tools to
>> optimize the work.
>>
>> *When the l10n start:
>> - we need a continuous communication and a planing of the updates made
>> in Pootle, those translating off line are always frightened to lose
>> something in the run.
>> - it's exhausting when you think you are over and to see a new bunch of
>> words coming. Knowing it in advance help to manage the time too
>>
>> *After RC1 and l10n integration
>> - we need to know when integration is made after our fixes, there is
>> currently no communication on this
>>
>> ==> for these three items, I have asked today to Andras and Christian
>> how we can put that in place and where I can help them to do so, knowing
>> also that Christian is managing this part almost alone now.
>>
>> *About the en_US overall quality
>> - the process to rely on the l10n team to fix the en_US version is ok,
>> even if it gives us extra work to understand what is meant before we
>> realized it's a mistake. So it's also error prone for all the translations.
>> - but that doesn't solve the several typos that already exist and that
>> are overlooked by the l10n team (e.g in the Character > Font Effect
>> dialog, there is Overline _c_olor and Underline _C_olor and this is the
>> same for several dialogs)
>> - that doesn't solve also the lack of universal vocabulary used in
>> several dialogs (e.g Tab/Pane/Panel/Deck to name the same object or
>> Graphic/Picture/Image). I've nothing to propose here but to define a
>> glossary where developers could pick the good word but I'm not sure it
>> will be used
>>
>
>> * About the help files
>> - I always wonder why there is a Help button on a new dialog when no
>> help file is appended ;)
>
> One thing that we could with the new .ui file format is to confirm if
> each dialog actually has a help entry for it. There is an easy hack at
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67350 to extract out the
> new-format helpids from the help and determine if they actually exist.
> That would weed out typos where the help gets detached from the thing it
> documents.
>
> Similarly someone could script if each new-format dialog has a help
> entry and make a list of stuff that is missing help and turn those into
> a list of tasks to document those things.
>
> Another thing that could be automated is to generate a skeleton help
> page from a new-format dialog. i.e. generate the help ids bookmarks for
> the interactive widgets, buttons, checkboxes, etc. and have fill-me-in
> headings and bodytext.
>
> C.
>
>
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