[FM Discuss] documentation news from OLPC summit

[Tomi Toivio]

This has also been asked by translators at Finnish FLOSS Manuals. I don't
know what you exactly mean, but I mean the kind of double screen where you
have the original on the left side and the translation on the right side.
Like we had in the old FLOSS Manuals. Which is funny, since I never used it
to translate, but many people apparently would like to use it.

What would be extremely useful (maybe you actually meant this) is if you
could see what kind of updates have been made to the original manual since
you translated it. I mean there would be a highlighting of the things that
have changed, so that you could translate only the changes. Currently this
should be done by painstakingly comparing the current versions of the
original manual and the translation, which is a bit hard.

And a third thing is that some people absolutely want to do the editing in a
word processing software, and when they copy it back you have to clean all
kinds of extra markup from the HTML code. Could you please make this
automatic? Not that it is a horribly demanding task to take those extra tags
away, but still kinda irritating. I think the editor is supposed to do this
to Word tags automatically, but I've been still seeing some kind of Apple
tags frequently.

There should also be a system which would very clearly indicate things such
as:
- When has the manual been updated.
- Which software version is the manual based on.
- What is the status of the localization of the software.
- Flags like: check terminology, proof-read, check technical content, update
screenshots, update manual to new software version, etc.

These would be very useful for readers since they probably would have a
really hard time figuring out what is the status of a manual. And these are
more important for smaller localizations like the Finnish one. We still
don't have so many people that you might expect somebody to automatically do
proofreading of all manuals or such things.

Also one thing that some people found really painful is that Xinha sometimes
deletes everything below the cursor. I still don't know why it does that, as
it happens so fast that I never manage to notice what actually happened.
Anyhow you can lose a lot of work if you haven't remembered to save all the
time, which is why I click the save button every 30 seconds or so. Also I
don't know if this is some bug in the browser or really in the Xinha, I am
not sure if it only happens on older browsers or also the latest versions.
Also I don't know if this is really even the task of Booki developers to
think about, since Xinha is a different software project. Anyhow some people
in our Finnish "pseudo-booksprints" unsurprisingly thought this one is the
most irritating bug, which is one of the reasons so many people wanna do
editing in a desktop word processor.

I myself am kinda like completely used to working with the current system,
so these ideas are based on what other people have been suggesting. Sorry if
I spoiled your day, but don't shoot the messenger! :)


2011/10/26 Daniel James <daniel.james at sourcefabric.org>

> Hi Tuukka,
>
> > The #1 feature request would be a more complete translation workflow
> > including tracking of changes to the original English version since a
> > translation was made.
>
> That feature would be *very* useful for Sourcefabric too. Tracking these
> changes would help prevent the translations falling out of step with the
> original. At the moment this has to be done manually, and it's very
> labour-intensive.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Daniel
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Best Regards
Tomi Toivio
Open Source Coordinator
http://fi.flossmanuals.net/
tomi at flossmanuals.net
+358445488856
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