[Sugar-devel] "Howtos" within Sugar Activities (was: Potential volunteer offering technical writing)

[Walter Bender]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 6:23 AM, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
> The problem with this is localization.
> If we want achieve all the activities translated  to all the needed
> languages
> (more than 110 active languages in pootle at this moment)
> you can see including manuals/howtos in the activities we will have a space
> problem.
> We are thinking in include a minimal help, like Implode activity
> or TurtleArt are doing, But with this minimal help, the TurtleArt po and
> locale directory
> are much bigger than all the other data in the activity.

Also, by including even simple help strings, the burden on the
translator when from a few hundred single-word strings to many many
long sentences. Even so, the real explanations are found in the wiki.

I took a different approach in Turtle Confusion: I added hints in the
form of short programs in the help. Not sure how to scale that
approach.

-walter


>
> Gonzalo
>
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Bastien <bzg at altern.org> wrote:
>>
>> I have read all the interesting input regarding refreshing the Help
>> activity and collectively writing up new Sugar lessons.
>>
>> One simple idea: why not try to put "howtos" *within* Sugar Activities?
>>
>> For example, the Turtle Art activity would have such a folder:
>>
>>  how/general-tutorial.txt
>>  how/drawing-a-square.txt
>>  how/playing-with-variables.txt
>>  how/...
>>
>> Plain text would be nice, as it could be later exported to HTML and
>> displayed within Sugar when required.  Plain text is also easier to
>> handle wrt translation.
>>
>> There has been a lot of discussion about accessing the "source" and
>> I see this "how/" folder something that we could feed with powerful
>> ideas, sitting between the source code and the activity.
>>
>> Also, it would help solving one of the biggest problem: having someone
>> who is in charge of maintaining this documentation.
>>
>> FWIW, I have updated the FLOSS/DOCS presentation in which I summarize
>> the background ideas and motivations for this proposal:
>>
>>  http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/the-four-letters-word-of-floss-docs.html
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> --
>>  Bastien
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>
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org