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Welcome to the next edition of the GNOME Documentation Project Status Report. As we pass GNOME 2 and start the point releases there is a lot of exciting work happening with the documentation and ancillary projects. A big thanks to everyone who worked on documentation, programs, and all the documentation maintainers who whipped their documents into shape.
Alexander Kirillov has written Introduction to GNOME giving people new to GNOME a tutorial to the GNOME 2 system.
Prior to the release of GNOME 2 John Fleck has completed the GNOME 2 Release Notes. The release notes outline new features and functionality of the GNOME 2 platform. The release notes also give installation prodecures and known issues for all platforms GNOME 2 supports.
Daniel Mueth stepped down as the GDP's Fearless Leader on June 20, 2002. Dan felt he could not continue in his role due to professional and personal constraints. We wish him the best of luck in his other pursuits. He will continue in his capacity as maintainer for Scrollkeeper.
John Fleck has accepted the position of the GDP's Fearless Leader on June 22, 2002. Dan Mueth nominated John when he stepped down and with the unanimous consent of the GDP mailing list he was accepted. We'd like to congratulate John as the new GDP's Fearless Leader and encourage everyone to give a big hello to John.
Alexander Kirillov, with help from Irene Ryan, has updated the templates for documentation in GNOME 2. The articleinfo portion of the templates should not be altered, except to add the document's information, because it has been customized to work with the GDP's stylesheet customizations. The rest of the templates, as always, are a suggestion and do not need to be followed exactly.
Eric Baudais has released a first draft of an update to the GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation. He is currently in the process of updating the Handbook with all the good suggestions people have made and will release a second draft soon. The new version of the Handbook will describe the GNOME documentation system and help a new writer start making documentation for the GDP.
The GDP webpages at http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp/ are being updated by Jon Allen. He is the GDP's newest webmaster and has been updating the content. If anyone wants their information from the Team page updated, contact Jon Allen at <jon@jonallen.org>.
The Wipro team hired by Sun has been improving the loading time of large documents in Yelp. They have been implementing a caching system. Each document will be converted to HTML at installation time and Yelp will not have to generate the HTML for the document each time it is requested. This has improved the loading time of documents from over 30 seconds to 3 seconds. The changes are in CVS. Be sure to look for these improvements in the next release. We'd like to give a thanks to Mikael Hallendal for developing and maintaining Yelp and to Sander Vesik for writing the stylesheets Yelp uses.
The Lampadas documentation management system will help the GDP organize the documentation authors contribute. David Merrill has been altering Lampadas to meet the GDP's needs. Lampadas will be able to track the status of each document, determine who is working on a document, show the last date the document was updated, provide a full description of the document's metadata, rate each document, and give comments to authors about their documentation. Later on Lampadas will be able to generate OMF files for the documentation from the metadata in Lampadas' database.
We are looking for volunteers for the following tasks:
We need people to work on the following:
Test the Yelp-based help system. Please send all bug reports to GNOME Bugzilla.
Update the remaining core documentation to GNOME 2. Also update other documentation as their respective applications are ported to GNOME 2.
We need developers to work on the following:
Write/update developer tutorials and white papers for GNOME 2. (high priority)
Write API docs.
Develop a gnome-docs package which provides a sane build system for GDP documentation. Contact Jody Goldberg <jody@gnome.org> for more information.
We need document authors to work on the following documents:
GNOME Display Manager for GNOME 2
Gnumeric — Contact Jody Goldberg <jody@gnome.org>.
gconf-editor
The GNOME Documentation Project Status Report is a periodic report describing the recent events of the GDP (GNOME Documentation Project) and the status of various documents. Lately the GDP Status Report has not been periodic. I plan to write this report periodically as events within the GDP warrant. I hope that these reports will be useful for GDP members, translators, developers, and potential GDP contributors. If you have any submissions or suggestions for these Status Reports, please send them to <baudais@kkpsi.org>.
The goal of the GDP (GNOME Documentation Project) is to provide a complete documentation system for GNOME. The main part of this is writing and maintaining application manuals for all applets and applications in the main GNOME distribution and GNOME Office. The GDP also writes other user documentation such as application hints (a la gnome-hint) and the GNOME User's Guide. The GDP also writes and maintains developer documentation such as API documents, White Papers, and developer tutorials. These developer documents are generally written by developers who work with the GDP since it requires technical expertise on the particular topic. And lastly, the GDP, along with various GNOME hackers, is responsible for designing the different components of the GNOME help system, such as the tutorial/demo wizard (coming soon), pop-up help (coming soon), and the documentation browsing system.
The GDP is always looking for new volunteers to write documentation or help in other ways. If you are interested in joining or contacting the GDP, visit the GDP web page, send an email to the gnome-doc-list <docs@gnome.org> or chat with us on IRC at #docs on irc.gnome.org.