[FM Discuss] documentation news from OLPC summit

[Daniel James]

Hi Adam,

> side by side is already there...click edit on any chapter then click
> "view chapter" you have the side by side

That's not the same - if the translation has been forked from the
original, through the 'import booki' process, you can only see revisions
of the fork in the view window, not any subsequent changes to the
original. The original manual is likely to get ahead of the fork
quickly, in terms of commits. So you would need to have at least two
browser tabs open to compare the latest versions of the original and
translation.

We were talking about the ability to see the edit window for the current
revision of the original book, side by side with the edit window for the
translation, within the same web page. (Why? Because translators can
also correct errors in the original, bringing both versions up to date).

Personally I would prefer not to use a pop-up window, because scrolling
two independent windows can get tricky - it's easy to lose your place.

> everything that was in the old system is there except tracking of
> updates in original but that will come

I guess that would mean each translated chapter would have to be tagged
with the revision number of the original chapter it was based on. Then
diffs from that version to the current version would be highlighted in
the 'original' window.

We can't assume that all manuals will start with English versions, so we
would need to tag chapters with an original language code too (which
might be implicit in the URL of the original book chapter). That would
cover books remixed from different language sources, say six chapters
from Spanish to Finnish and three chapters from French to Finnish.

There would need to be some way for users to declare the translation
complete, such as a checkbox, so that the
original-language-code-x-and-revision-number-y tag could be updated.

Cheers!

Daniel