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HiI've been working with the Haiku User Documentation Translator for a few days which has made me learn little about how it works. Sadly, I have to say that I have identified a lot of future obstacles.
- First of all, the tool is quite messy codevise. It is difficult to change.
- No support for versioning (ie R1, R2 etc). Very difficult to implement! - The documentation is hard-coded in html. - Documentation cannot be exported to other formats, such as pdf's.- Layout changes (or similar) must be changed _manually_ in every document (except for css).
I would suggest that we start looking into alternatives. I would strongly suggest that we use DocBook for markup hosted on a central repository for revision control. Any DocBook editor will work for editing.
Gettext should be used to generate .po files that can be imported into Pootle. This way, translators can work with Haiku interface and documentation localization using the same tool. That's a win-win!
Different versions could then be generated, like one page and multi-page html and a pdf book, which could even be printed and sold, generating revenue.
I think this is the proper way to go. A lot of work, but definitely less than rewriting our current tool. And it's future proof!
Good introduction to DocBook: http://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~agiurca/tutorials/DocBook/index.htm
Patrik
