Hi Kevin, and welcome! it's fantastic you want to contribute to the documentation effort. GNOME really needs top quality documentation, and we're glad you're eager to participate. First, you'd like to contact also the gedit and gparted maintainers, respectively Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com> and Curtis Gedak <gedakc users sourceforge net>, to inform them you're going to change the documentation. Maybe they can give you a hint on what's mostly done and what isn't. Please note that whereas gedit already has a "help" directory with documentation in xml format, gparted has none. You should ask Curtis to be so kind to set it up in the repository so you could start your work. A small guide which explains how this is done is here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeDocUtilsCreateNew If it's the first time you work on documentation, probably you'll want to start with gedit since there's already something done and you don't need to setup anything. Then, if you've a debian-based distro, like Ubuntu, for example, you can get subversion installing it via apt-get: sudo apt-get install subversion You'll need also the "gnome-doc-utils" package for your distro. Once you're set, you just need to issue: svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gedit/trunk gedit svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gparted/trunk gparted You then will find the help files for gedit in its "help/C" subdirectory (for English). Remember gparted still has none. The file "gedit.xml" is the one you want to tweak. It's in the DocBook format, which somewhat resembles HTML which you may be familiar with. There are some good guides around about DocBook; the official guide is: http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html Of course you don't need to read all that, but it's great to have it as a reference of the various entities. Maybe someone else on this list may point you to some kickstart-tutorial on DocBook. Even if it may seem a little bit overcomplicated at first, writing fluently in DocBook comes easy enough quite fast. Once you've modified the .xml file, you'll want to launch: gnome-doc-tool xhtml gedit.xml This should create a series of .html files. Open gedit.html and see the if the changes you've done are okay. When you're satisfied with the result, you can send the diff to the maintainer. For example, from the gedit directory: svn diff > gedit-documentation.patch I believe you just need to post the patch on the relevant mailing list (namely, the one of gedit), or open a bug at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ attaching your patch. Ah, every once in a while (before starting to work on the manual again) you'd want to do a: svn update inside of the gedit dir, to ensure you're working with the latest revision. In the unlikely case you'll encounter some conflicts during time, you'll need to solve them. The subversion manual says something about that. Cheers and good luck! If you need or don't understand something, please drop a line. Matteo Il giorno gio, 01/05/2008 alle 21.38 -0400, Kevin ha scritto: > > Hello, > > My name is Reggie Buckner. I been hooked on Gnome for the past year and felt compelled to join the Gnome project. I would like to hep write Gparted and Gedit documentation whether it be in Wiki, text or PDF format. Please tell me what I can do to get started on doing this. I have the ability to write and edit (software) just need some mentoring on how to contribute. I have subscribed to the mailing list already. > > Reggie > > > > _______________________________________________ > No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding. > Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com > > > _______________________________________________ > gnome-doc-list mailing list > gnome-doc-list gnome org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
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