[libreoffice-l10n] Re: LibreOffice Help

[Jan Holesovsky]

Hi Martin,

Martin Srebotnjak píše v Út 08. 10. 2013 v 22:24 +0200:

> maintaining and translating LO help via wiki is a no-go for localization
> (teams).

No need for any strong words here I hope - as you have seen in the past,
we have always agreed wrt. wikihelp on something that worked for all :-)
Please read further, hopefully you'll reconsider your hard 'no-go' a
bit.

At the moment, 2 efforts are ongoing:

1) Kill the internal help system, and use html instead

In order to be able to do that, we need to implement the search and
indexing functionality in Javascript, and that is what Rob is working
on.  For you, as the translators, nothing changes, this is orthogonal to
your work - it will be just taken from git & pootle (or potentially
wikihelp or whatever source), converted to html, and the result will be
used in the LibreOffice build.

The reasoning for this is that a) everyone has a browser these days, b)
we won't have to maintain the code for the internal help system at all,
and c) we know it is doable - there are some proprietary solutions out
there that do exactly this.

This does not touch your workflow at all.

2) Make wikihelp the source of the help

This is something we need to do in order to be able to improve our help.
Virtually nobody writes help these days, because of the format that is
used there, and the workflow that need committing to git etc.  Only
fraction of the new features has suitable help, and we need to change
this.

But - and that is important - we of course need to do it in a way that
fits everyone, l10n most of all :-)  So as I assured you many times, no
translation will be lost.  We only have to agree what fits you best; and
before you answer that you want nothing else than Pootle, it would be
good to test what Markus is about to set up; I am sure he'll write you
more about that when it is ready for testing - and it will be up to you
to decide if it is acceptable for you, or tell him what features are
missing.  You will _not_ have to translate entire pages, the system is
going to be very similar to Pootle, based on
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate .

I know of the following advantages that would improve over our current
workflow:

- No more mistakes in the xml markup [happens with the current system
  from time to time that a mistake in the translation kills the help
  page]

- Possibility to preview the translated sentence in context of the
  entire paragraph or page _immediately_, without you having to wait for
  a developer build [impossible with current system].  This would make
  you independent on developers, and would give you more time to
  translate.

- Possibility to translate via .po files [as I know, the solution that
  Markus has in mind allows you to export to .po, and import back]

If you are afraid of the editable wikihelp in general, please don't be -
only l10n and documentation people will have access, and I am sure
you'll be able to agree what kind of changes are acceptable, and what
are not, in order not to introduce problems for you.

So please - open your mind here, and test it when it is prepared for
testing, your feedback will be extremely valuable.

Thank you,
Kendy