ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Shaun McCance <shaunm@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2010-05-17 at 17:31 -0500, Jim Campbell wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Time requires that I be brief, but I've added some notes to your wiki
> page about a support and learning center [0].  Mozilla Sumo seems to
> cover most all of what you've requested, and the site code is freely
> available.  I'd recommend taking a look at it if things go that way.
> 
> With regards to DocBook, Mallard and sharing content via content
> pools, it seems like Mallard, DITA, and Docbook have a game of
> rock-paper-scissors going on . . . 
> - Mallard could fare well enough in a "content pool," and is supported
> by Yelp (the Gnome help browser), but there is no Mallard-to-PDF
> transform available at this time.
> - DITA is expressly designed for "content pools," and can be output to
> PDF (and HTML and epub), but yelp does not currently support DITA, and
> Gnome is going toward Mallard.  
> - Yelp supports Docbook, and you can ouput to PDF from Docbook, but
> Docbook is not particularly well-suited to "content pools."

Yelp might support DITA in 3.0. And the DITA OT might support
Mallard as an output format some time in the future. The DITA
OT is way too heavyweight for the GNOME build process. I don't
know how the Ubuntu docs or manual teams feel about it.

I think it's actually easier to go from Mallard to DITA, so a
possible solution is for the manual team to convert the Mallard
content from the docs team to DITA, supplement it with additional
content, and create a bookmap.

(Maps in DITA can actually reference non-DITA content, assuming
support from the build tools. So if Mallard were supported as an
input format, the Mallard->DITA step could be skipped entirely.)
> 
> With regards to the manual team's use of LaTeX, the output the HTML
> and PDF is very good, but translations are all done manually.  Each of
> the other markups shown above are XML-based, and can thus be used with
> existing translation tools.
> 
> Jim
> 
> [0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-support-and-learning-center#Notes

There's a lot of really pretty mockups in there, with a lot
of on-hover interactions. Can whoever works on this please
make sure it's accessible to users with disabilities, such
as those who can't use a mouse?

-- 
Shaun McCance
http://syllogist.net/