Re: [Libreoffice] [libreoffice-l10n] Re: LibreOffice WikiHelp

2010/12/14 Michael Meeks <michael.meeks@novell.com>

> On Mon, 2010-12-13 at 14:33 +0100, Jan Holesovsky wrote:
> > I think the biggest issue is the offline editing; and I think here we
> > can use the Wiki Publisher
> > (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher)  to
> > edit the pages in LibreOffice.
>
>         Ooh - that is an interesting idea :-)
I believe that is not a good idea. It will reformat the content and make
changes tracking a nightmare. Also, translating from changed US wiki to
other languages will be a nightmare.


> >   I did not test it yet, but if the
> > extension misses the functionality to merge the changes done in the
> > wiki, it will be easy to plug it to LibreOffice document merge feature.
>
>         Sure; but I suspect there are issues around dictionaries, and other
> helpful tooling that make translators lives easy :-)
>
>        Anyhow - it'd be great to collect the ideas for flows into the wiki
> page; quite possibly there are several flows possible, and we can choose
> per language. eg. if there is already a near-perfect translation, I can
> understand people might not want it 'vandalised' by others changing
> it :-) On the other hand, if there is simply no translation at all
> currently for a language, almost anything might look better than nothing
> - so perhaps an in-wiki-editing policy might make sense.
>
>        Either way, I for one am excited by the idea of having something
> that
> is easier to edit and improve in English, although clearly the more, and
> higher quality help in English we have, the harder the (already huge)
> help translation problem becomes I guess.

I don't have time to go to wiki and edit it, please someone do it if you
deem my thoughts worth published there.

I guess from all the discussion here we see that the LO developers and
documentation team wish to get help onto a new platform, where it will be
easier to maintain.

On the other hand the localization teams who have invested big resources
into translating the huge help system wish to continue working like before
in a Pootle or similar environment.

I propose you develop a system to have English help editable on wiki but
fully transportable back to the po/xliff system (interchangeable).
All the translations would start from the English po/xliff help files and
decide whether to
a) strictly translate English help (like we Slovenians decided) and keep
working with po/xliff files; the online help would be updated from these
files at least with every minor and major release;
or
b) develop their own help in the wiki and never go back again;

Before I go on I need an answer to a question. I tried the help in RC1 and
it seems that help items do not get passed to wiki i.e. the default module
help page opens even if you press F1 in a certain dialog (the previous
bundled help showed that definite topic in the help). Is this how the wiki
help is envisioned? If it is, one need a lot of searching to even get to a
certain topic and this makes the help totally unusable. If this is the case
the wiki help should only be a web version of the bundled help, just a copy
made after every release from the release translations.

Lp, m.