LibreOffice Help

l10n
#1

Hi Rob,

I'm adding the l10n list in copy because they are concerned

Hi Sophie,

As I understood the offline help is now hard to maintain.

Yes, this is something complicated for developers
This should

change that so that the help-wiki will be exported for each release's
offline help. So It should make changing/translating the help easier.

I don't doubt that the wiki would be easier than filling the help .ott
and using the basic macros that was used in the past, I've used it and
it's really complicated.
What is important for us (l10n team) is the possibility to use Pootle to
maintain our translation, because the wiki is not a translation tool (no
glossary, no TM, no way to track changes, no way to mark incorrect/fuzzy
strings, no way to share the files, no xml checks, etc...) and is
impossible to search currently (we need a i18n wiki for that).
That means also that the wiki edition is restrained to the necessary
changes and enhancements that are needed and only those and that changes
are only made in the en_US sources.
I understand that you are currently only working on the process to
export the wiki, but I think that the l10n team may have some input too.
Again (because already expressed to Kendy), my concerns are not about
the changes in the process, I really understand that, but about to make
sure that the l10n team is made aware of the changes in their work if
any, and that the way they are working currently to localize those
important and huge files is taken into account in the process.

Kind regards
Sophie

#2

Hi,

maintaining and translating LO help via wiki is a no-go for localization
(teams).

If someone wants to play with that, he/she can do it as one's own pet
project, maybe by creating a fork of LO. But LO should officially stay away
from it. Or it will, quite soon, become an English-only office suite. If
that will be the case, the localization teams should think about forking LO
:slight_smile:

Lp, m.

#3

Hi Martin,
Hey, hey :slight_smile: this is not the case for the moment. Rob is currently working
on exporting the wiki help content to the sources (if I understand well).
My mail was to make sure that all the aspects of maintaining the help on
the wiki are taken into account. But if the help is better enhanced on the
wiki, it's not a problem on the contrary, the l10n process should not be
changed however.
Kind regards
Sophie

GSM

#4

I agree with your conclusion. L10n for help files should stay on pootle.
Wiki is horrible translation tool.

Best regards,
Mihovil
Dana 8. 10. 2013. 22:16 "Sophie" <gautier.sophie@gmail.com> je napisao/la:

#5

Hi Martin,

Martin Srebotnjak píše v Út 08. 10. 2013 v 22:24 +0200:

maintaining and translating LO help via wiki is a no-go for localization
(teams).

No need for any strong words here I hope - as you have seen in the past,
we have always agreed wrt. wikihelp on something that worked for all :slight_smile:
Please read further, hopefully you'll reconsider your hard 'no-go' a
bit.

At the moment, 2 efforts are ongoing:

1) Kill the internal help system, and use html instead

In order to be able to do that, we need to implement the search and
indexing functionality in Javascript, and that is what Rob is working
on. For you, as the translators, nothing changes, this is orthogonal to
your work - it will be just taken from git & pootle (or potentially
wikihelp or whatever source), converted to html, and the result will be
used in the LibreOffice build.

The reasoning for this is that a) everyone has a browser these days, b)
we won't have to maintain the code for the internal help system at all,
and c) we know it is doable - there are some proprietary solutions out
there that do exactly this.

This does not touch your workflow at all.

2) Make wikihelp the source of the help

This is something we need to do in order to be able to improve our help.
Virtually nobody writes help these days, because of the format that is
used there, and the workflow that need committing to git etc. Only
fraction of the new features has suitable help, and we need to change
this.

But - and that is important - we of course need to do it in a way that
fits everyone, l10n most of all :slight_smile: So as I assured you many times, no
translation will be lost. We only have to agree what fits you best; and
before you answer that you want nothing else than Pootle, it would be
good to test what Markus is about to set up; I am sure he'll write you
more about that when it is ready for testing - and it will be up to you
to decide if it is acceptable for you, or tell him what features are
missing. You will _not_ have to translate entire pages, the system is
going to be very similar to Pootle, based on
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate .

I know of the following advantages that would improve over our current
workflow:

- No more mistakes in the xml markup [happens with the current system
  from time to time that a mistake in the translation kills the help
  page]

- Possibility to preview the translated sentence in context of the
  entire paragraph or page _immediately_, without you having to wait for
  a developer build [impossible with current system]. This would make
  you independent on developers, and would give you more time to
  translate.

- Possibility to translate via .po files [as I know, the solution that
  Markus has in mind allows you to export to .po, and import back]

If you are afraid of the editable wikihelp in general, please don't be -
only l10n and documentation people will have access, and I am sure
you'll be able to agree what kind of changes are acceptable, and what
are not, in order not to introduce problems for you.

So please - open your mind here, and test it when it is prepared for
testing, your feedback will be extremely valuable.

Thank you,
Kendy

#6

Hi,

2013.10.09 10:59, Jan Holesovsky wrote:

<...>

2) Make wikihelp the source of the help

This is something we need to do in order to be able to improve our help.
Virtually nobody writes help these days, because of the format that is
used there, and the workflow that need committing to git etc. Only
fraction of the new features has suitable help, and we need to change
this.

But - and that is important - we of course need to do it in a way that
fits everyone, l10n most of all :slight_smile: So as I assured you many times, no
translation will be lost. We only have to agree what fits you best; and
before you answer that you want nothing else than Pootle, it would be
good to test what Markus is about to set up; I am sure he'll write you
more about that when it is ready for testing - and it will be up to you
to decide if it is acceptable for you, or tell him what features are
missing. You will _not_ have to translate entire pages, the system is
going to be very similar to Pootle, based on
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate .

If this does not work out as well as expected, you may want to take a
look at https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/ . This is the platform that
runs support.mozilla.org – a fully localizable Mozilla's support wiki,
which has superceded built-in help in Firefox and Thunderbird long ago.
Having used it a bit, I could say that its localization UI sucks at the
moment, but I think this problem should be easy to solve, because it is
limited to UI only.

Rimas