GIMP-Help ========= GIMP-Help is a help system designed for use with the internal GIMP help browser, external web browser and HTML renderers, and human eyeballs. Docbook is used to create a highly customizable system for all needs. The current manual document features of GIMP 2.4. Project page and news ===================== Recent changes and updates about the modules are available at: http://docs.gimp.org and our wiki page: http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/GimpDocs The help system is written in many languages. There is currently no reference language and we don't support to translate the manual by using GNU gettext. This has the following advantages: - Every language group and every author can decide how much information he want to provide on a specific topic. He doesn't translate just a string. - We can provide an easier fallback to English for our readers, because the layout and structure of each chapter and section doesn't change. - This way should encourage collaboration between translations. For example, if a french translator spots a formatting problem in another translation he is able to fix it. - The use of DocBook/XML is a format independent container format. But obviously there are disadvantages: - The DocBook/XML approach has a high entry barrier for people who use text editors only occasionally. Tips for contribution ===================== Write a mail to one of the authors (check the WIKI). They should know what tasks need to be done and can find something to do for you. You should subscribe to the gimp mailing lists to get up to date information of the current GIMP development. What you should know -------------------- You should know a bit about Docbook and XML, or be smart enough to learn the syntax yourself. You can get more information about Docbook and XML by using your preferred search engine. Editors, Programs and Setups ---------------------------- Use any editor you want, but you should handle it well. Please keep in mind, that the tab width in XML Mode should be 2 spaces. If you send us a patch, create the diff as a unified diff by typing svn diff > help.patch from your gimp-help-2 directory. Provided you have xmllint installed, you can check the well-formedness of the XML files by running make lint and validate the XML by running make validate Hints for making good screenshots --------------------------------- * please make screenshots only with the system default theme, which is of course just the plain gtk+ default look * use default fonts like Bitstream Vera Sans * crop the window manager borders * provide your source images (eg. for making new screenshots in other languages) Why not using ... ----------------- People asking from time to time why we're not using System X to create the manual and translations. We know, that DocBook has a big learning curve. TODO ==== see Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=GIMP-manual OMF Files ========= The directory omf holds documentation metadata that describes the user manual and its localized versions. The format is described by the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF). A good resource on this subject is the ScrollKeeper website: http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net/ ODF Files ========= You need docbook2odf installed to create ODF files. Although the transformation process is very slow (because every picture is copied to a temp directory), you can start the transformation by typing: make odf Hint: Set the ALL_LINGUAS environment variable to create ODF files only for a particular language. Docbook2ODF can be obtained from the following website: http://open.comsultia.com/docbook2odf/ HINT: If you get an error opening the created ODT files, open docbook2odf (probably installed in /usr/bin/) in a text editor. Uncomment the line: #use encoding 'utf-8'; and rerun 'make odf'. History of the gimp-help-2 module ================================= The development on the original gimp-help modules came pretty much to a stop after the first few stable versions of GIMP 1.2 were released. This is due to several reasons, one of them being that all of the original documentation had been converted from HTML to DocBook/SGML and apart from a bit new content, lots of markup and proofreading not too much happened to the organisation of the complete mess. Daniel Egger and Mel Boyce were not too happy about the quirks with this help system. So they started completely from scratch creating a new manual based on Docbook/XML.