Pidgin Manual proposal - need some feedback

[Ananda Samaddar]

Sascha Vogt wrote:
> 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-
> 

It depends what we want for online help in Pidgin.  If we use Docbook 
this could be converted for use in Yelp.  This raises the issue of 
whether or not we should make online help on Unix-type platforms GNOME 
specific though.  We could always just include it in locally stored HTML 
format and call the default web browser to open it.

As for Windows I've got no idea about that with respect to online help 
(in application help - F1).

I'm going to start work on the text and have an initial version out by 
this weekend hopefully, so I'll post it here when I've got something to 
show.

Ananda


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