ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Phil Bull <philbull@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Luke,

On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 10:20 +0100, Luke-Jennings wrote:
> Having read back through this thread I thought I would add my 2 cents.
> It appears we have a bit of a problem, the docs team would like to
> convert to mallard, which will have to be done by hand as there is no
> tool. But there is no tool to convert to mallard to latex, but there is
> a docbook to latex converter. So its a bit of a toss up, I would think
> one of the teams can write a tool to convert to the other format, I am
> sure there is someone with the skills. 

The "doing it by hand" bit of DocBook->Mallard would mostly be necessary
anyway. At the moment we have topic-based help done in a markup designed
for linear docs. Most of the work in conversion will be in restructuring
the docs, not changing one set of tags for another (that's easy enough
to do with regexps).

I'm hoping to find time to actually do some of the conversion work over
the next month. If anyone is interested in helping out, please let me
know!

> Phill Bull said 
> "I think Xfce may be willing to adopt Mallard, but I'm not sure what the
> situation is with KDE. The others I have even less idea about."
> 
> How much do distributions like kubuntu, xubuntu and lubuntu derive their
> docs from the ubuntu team? Will it mean that they have to also convert
> to mallard? Or will they be converting the mallard back to docbook?

I'm not sure about this. As far as I'm aware, the Kubuntu docs overlap
very little with the Ubuntu docs. I'm not sure about Xubuntu either.

> As for the translations I think that until we know how much we risk
> messing up, we should not start doing too much. There are a lot of
> translators that have put in hard work, and it would be very annoying
> for them to have to do it again. 

I agree. This is definitely something that we should test before moving
too far forwards.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull