Documentation

[John Ralls]

On Dec 10, 2013, at 6:48 PM, David Carlson <carlson.dl at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> On 12/10/2013 12:40 PM, John Ralls wrote:
>> As we get down to the wire for releasing GnuCash 2.6, we still have 45 open documentation bugs. You can see the list at http://tinyurl.com/q6y4jvt; each bug on that list is a clickable link to the details.
>> 
>> If you’ve been looking for a way to contribute to Gnucash (or even if you haven’t ;-) ) but can’t contribute code for whatever reason, working on the documentation would be an excellent way to help.
>> 
>> Following the Gnome practice we use DocBook. Gnome has a nice manual for writing documentation, including DocBook, at https://developer.gnome.org/gdp-handbook/stable/. 
> 
> I just took another look at that DocBook reference and got overwhelmed
> again by references to using multiple programs that do not run in
> Windows, SVN, stylesheets, XML, etc., which reminds me of why I have
> been submitting my documentation requests (several of those 45) in plain
> text.  That seems to be where they end, because I am not ready to spend
> several weeks learning how to get those programs running, etc.  If
> someone knows how to convert text into appropriate XML with valid tags,
> etc., I wish they would go ahead and do it.  Then I could let loose with
> a whole bunch of additional documentation bugs.
> 

Have a go with this:
http://www.openoffice.org/xml/xmerge/docbook/

It's not exactly a direct conversion of text, but if you can get it to work it'll be a lot easier than wrangling XML directly. 

Another possibility: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Converting_wiki_to_DocBook_XML?rd=DocsProject/Wiki2XML

We might be able to write a script to pull from the wiki. In the meantime, it suggests a temporary solution: Put your suggestions into the wiki. That way they'll be formatted and accessible. If we can't manage anything else we can put a pointer in the docs.

Regards,
John Ralls