[sword-devel] Sword.chm update - as group project

[Jerry Hastings]

At 06:44 PM 9/3/2002 +0700, Adrian Korten wrote:
>Good day,
>
>Could you also post the original files in a compressed format? I don't have
>experience with creating Help files but at some point it will be helpful to
>create a Thai (and other languages) help file.

I put an non-compiled set of the files at:
http://www.crosswire.org/sword/ALPHAcckswwlkrfre22034820285912/alpha/Swordch 
mRAW.zip

This has been on my mind for some time. I was going to wait until the new 
BibleCS release was out to bring up the subject. But, at this point the 
current help file is ready to go (I hope), so I guess I am ready to get 
into this.

I would like to discuss what would be the best way to work on the help 
files as a group.

I am thinking of recreating the files using PHP. That will let me break the 
pages into separate sections of graphics, code and text. The graphics and 
texts could be posted, perhaps on CVS, so people could download one graphic 
or one section of text to edit or translate. This way people could download 
just a text file to edit in any text editor to create new translations 
without needing to know HH, HTML or PHP. People that like to work on 
graphics could download just the graphics and update them. Then we could 
use PHP to view it as complete pages and capture that to rebuild the chm 
files. In the case of a translation all the graphics and files would be 
placed on the server in a directory just for that locale and the help file 
produced would be locale.chm. There would be one master set of PHP files 
that all translations would use. Copies of these masters would be placed in 
each locale translation directory to let editors see their results without 
having to compile a chm file.

Making changes to the master PHP files will take some thought. The HTML 
Help project files will contain links to anchors in the PHP files. Some 
pages are now very big and should be split. Other pages have topics that 
should be on separate pages. This means that some items in the TOC and 
index will no longer work unless they are updated at the same time. I am 
not sure what the best method/protocol to do this would be. The TOC and 
index files are basically just HTML list of objects. The names of the 
entries should be changed for each locale. This is going to be a trick to 
coordinate. I am thinking of giving each translation directory a file with 
a list of these names that can be edited and then a batch search and 
replace done before compiling a chm.

But, the great thing about this is the people working on translating the 
text and graphics don't have to worry about the PHP/HTML files.

Another option is to dump the chm format and convert to general book 
format. I don't know if we are ready for that. Does gen book support 
graphics? Also, one would not be able to keep the help and another 
commentary (like the personal) open at the same time.

Jerry