Pidgin Manual proposal - need some feedback

[Sascha Vogt]

Hi,

Mark Doliner wrote:
> I've been kind of wondering what the best format is... do you think it would
> be more useful to people as a set of web pages?  Almost like a visual FAQ? 
> I'm trying to decide if people are more likely to view a PDF or a web page. 
> One benefit of a web page is that it's more accessible to web search engines.
I agree with Dennis here. Ideally the documentation should be available 
in three formats. There should be an Online Help in the program, where 
matching chapters according to the actual operation should be opened 
(e.g creating or managing an account -> F1 should show the relevant 
chapter/s). Additional there could be a PDF (or a somewhat nice 
formatted text file) distributed with the program itself and last but 
not least, for those usually browsing the web to find documentation, 
there should be a set of HTML pages.

2 and 3 should'nt be a problem with using latex or docbook as the 
"backend"-format, though I'm not sure how to achieve 1 the easiest way.

@Dennis and Ananda: If you get this starting, I'm willing to contribute 
one or another chapter, or at least help with reviewing and/or 
translating some parts. I guess, once an english version has formed, 
we'll want to translate it, because as you both stated, this should be a 
documentation for the non-technical user, who is usually not that 
experienced in foreign languages.

Greetings
-Sascha-