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Welcome to the latest edition of the GNOME Documentation Project Status Report. As we approach GNOME 2, there is a lot of exciting work going on in preparation for the most significant release, in terms of documentation and documentation infrastructure, since the docs-writing blitz that lead up to GNOME 1.2.
After the complaints about the old GNOME Help Browser, and some of the uncertainties about using Nautilus as a help browser because of its speed, we now have help browser proliferation.
Porting of Nautilus to GNOME 2 is getting started, and for those who have been uncomfortable with the time penalty and weight of using the Mozilla plug-in to render our help HTML, gtkhtml support in the current Nautilus works well.
Mikael Hallendal, the developer of the way cool DevHelp help browser for API docs, is building a GNOME help browser called Yelp modeled after DevHelp.
As they say on television infomercials - "But wait, there's more. If you call our special 800 number today, you also get..." The Galeon crew has added GNOME help support to what is becoming many users' browser of choice. Type gnome-help:appname at the command line of the latest Galeon to see the help files of the app of your choice.
To provide the raw materials for all these browsers, Patanjali Somayaji is working on gnome-db2html3, a DocBook-to-HTML converter that will convert our DocBook on-the-fly to viewable HTML for the browsers' consumption. It is based on Daniel Veillard's libxml2 and libxslt, which I think are two of the cooler applications of Alan Turing's ideas about the possibilities of the finite state machine.
With the help of Glynn Foster and Anders Carlsson, we're moving the help converters - DocBook-to-html, man-to-html and info-to-html - to libgnome, so help browser makers won't have a Nautilus dependency.
To make all this new conversion magic work, and of course to be fully buzzword compliant, we'll be converting all of our documents to DocBook XML. A bunch of people have been working on this. Greg Leblanc chose the massive Style Guide as a test case to figure out what's required. Alexander Kirillov (Sasha) is working on conversions as well, and has written a terrific guide to bringing your computer into the brave new world of XML. I've also written a less-than-terrific how-to on converting your docs, which is already a little out of date but will be updated regularly.
Sasha also is working on updates to the templates, which will include XML conversion as well as some other updates.
For display, Eric Baudais is working on a set of GNOME documentation customizations to Norman Walsh's DocBook stylesheets. These will likely be used in two ways - as standalone customizations for generating static html from our docs, and integrated with Patanjali's gnome-db2html3 customizations needed for the on-the-fly docs rendering.