GIMP-Help
=========

GIMP-Help is a help system designed for use with the internal GIMP help
browser, external web browser and HTML renderers, and human eyeballs. 
Docbook is used to create a highly customizable system for all needs. 

The current manual document features of GIMP 2.4. 


Project page and news
=====================

Recent changes and updates about the modules are available at:

  http://docs.gimp.org

and our wiki page:

  http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/GimpDocs

The help system is written in many languages. There is currently no
reference language and we don't support to translate the manual by using
GNU gettext. This has the following advantages:

    - Every language group and every author can decide how much
      information he want to provide on a specific topic. He doesn't
      translate just a string.

    - We can provide an easier fallback to English for our readers,
      because the layout and structure of each chapter and section
      doesn't change.

    - This way should encourage collaboration between translations. For
      example, if a french translator spots a formatting problem in
      another translation he is able to fix it.

    - The use of DocBook/XML is a format independent container format.
      
But obviously there are disadvantages:

    - The DocBook/XML approach has a high entry barrier for people who
      use text editors only occasionally.


Tips for contribution
=====================

Write a mail to one of the authors (check the WIKI).
They should know what tasks need to be done and can find something to
do for you. You should subscribe to the gimp mailing lists to get up
to date information of the current GIMP development.

  What you should know
  --------------------

  You should know a bit about Docbook and XML, or be smart enough to learn
  the syntax yourself. You can get more information about Docbook and XML
  by using your preferred search engine.

  Editors, Programs and Setups
  ----------------------------

  Use any editor you want, but you should handle it well. Please keep in
  mind, that the tab width in XML Mode should be 2 spaces. If you send us
  a patch, create the diff as a unified diff by typing

    svn diff > help.patch 

  from your gimp-help-2 directory.

  Provided you have xmllint installed, you can validate the XML
  and check the well-formedness of the XML files by running

    make validate

  When you edit an XML file and want to quickly check your changes,
  you can create a single quick-and-dirty HMTL draft file with

    make src/of/the/xml-file.draft

  where the target is the path name with extension ".draft" instead
  of ".xml".


  Hints for making good screenshots
  ---------------------------------

  * please make screenshots only with the system default theme, which
    is of course just the plain gtk+ default look
  * use default fonts like Bitstream Vera Sans
  * crop the window manager borders
  * before saving an image as PNG, check if you can convert it to indexed
    mode without loss of quality (saves space and bandwidth)
  * provide your source images (eg. for making new screenshots in other
    languages) 

  Why not using ...
  -----------------
  People asking from time to time why we're not using System X to
  create the manual and translations. We know, that DocBook has a big
  learning curve.


TODO
====

see Bugzilla:

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=GIMP-manual



OMF Files
=========

The directory omf holds documentation metadata that describes the user
manual and its localized versions. The format is described by the
Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF). A good resource on this subject
is the ScrollKeeper website:  http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net/


ODF Files
=========

You need docbook2odf installed to create ODF files. Although the
transformation process is very slow (because every picture is copied to
a temp directory), you can start the transformation by typing:

    make odf

Hint: Set the ALL_LINGUAS environment variable to create ODF files only
for a particular language. 
Docbook2ODF can be obtained from the following website:

    http://open.comsultia.com/docbook2odf/

HINT: If you get an error opening the created ODT files, open
docbook2odf (probably installed in /usr/bin/) in a text editor.
Uncomment the line:

    #use encoding 'utf-8';

and rerun 'make odf'.


History of the gimp-help-2 module
=================================

The development on the original gimp-help modules came pretty much to a
stop after the first few stable versions of GIMP 1.2 were released. This is
due to several reasons, one of them being that all of the original
documentation had been converted from HTML to DocBook/SGML and apart from a
bit new content, lots of markup and proofreading not too much happened to
the organisation of the complete mess.

Daniel Egger and Mel Boyce were not too happy about the quirks with 
this help system. So they started completely from scratch creating a new
manual based on Docbook/XML.
