Ecrire un manuel d'application

Notes

Les manuels seront inclus comme des sous-pages de la page principale de l'application. Pour faire court, je parlerai de cette page principale comme Appname. La structure, devra en conséquence avoir la forme suivante :

• Appname
  • Appname/Hints and Tips
• Appname/Manual # Your Contents page
  • Appname/Manual/An Introduction to Appname
  • Appname/Manual/Configuration Choices
  • Appname/Manual/The First Time you use Appname
  • Appname/Manual/section 1
  • Appname/Manual/section xxx
  • Appname/Manual/Hints and Tips
  • Appname/Manual/Troubleshooting
  • Appname/Manual/Bug reports
  • Appname/Manual/Get involved #link to techbase etc

Si certaines de vos sections grossissent trop, vous pouvez mettre les sous-sections sur des pages séparées. Ce qui pourrait ressembler à :

• Appname/Manual # Your Contents page
  • Appname/Manual/An Introduction to Appname
  • Appname/Manual/Configuration Choices
  • Appname/Manual/The First Time you use Appname
  • Appname/Manual/section 1
    • Appname/Manual/section 1/subsection 1
    • Appname/Manual/section 1/subsection 2

and so on.

Information

The page names do not have to follow the structure of the document closely! In the above example you could simply use Appname/Manual/subsection 2 instead of Appname/Manual/section 1/subsection 2 and similarly for sub-subsections (as long as this procedure does not produce duplicate names ).

À noter

Essayez d'avoir des noms courts pour les pages et évitez d'avoir les chemins trops longs. Les noms de pages trop longs sont fastidieux à taper lorsque vous les reliez, et ils ne sont pas beaux sur les pages wiki. Et rappelez-vous toujours: Les noms de pages et leur structure n'ont aucune influence sur le manuel fini ! Il est entièrement déterminé par les titres dans le texte actuel.

Pour que le Docbook généré automatiquement ait la même page de contenu que celle que vous avez créée sur UserBase et pour que les liens fonctionnent dans le Docbook, il y a quelques règles à suivre :

• La table des matières de Docbook répertorie toutes les sections et sous-sections, qu'elles possèdent ou non une page. D'un autre côté, les sous-sous-sections ne seront pas listées dans la table des matières Docbook même si elles ont leur propre page.

• Toutes les pages doivent avoir une entête tout en haut, ou bien une section (== ... ==), ou une sous-section (=== ... ===), ou encore une sous-sous-section (==== ... ====), sinon la structure du Docbook sera perturbée.

• Le titre de la section/sous-section doit être le même que le nom de la page, sinon les liens Docbook ne fonctionneront pas.

• Subsection titles must be written like this: ===title===, even if it is the top level on a page. Otherwise the Docbook structure will be messed up. Similarly, if you have a very long subsection with subsubsections on pages of their own, these pages must have their titles written like this: ====title====.

• Subsubsections that should not appear in the contents page and should not appear on a page of its own in the Docbook must be level 4 or below, i.e ==== or more.

• Les liens vers les pages du manuel doivent correspondre exactement au nom de la page name (c'est à dire pas de liens par redirection !)

• If you link to a subsection of a page, you must have an anchor at the target location. Failing that will mess up Docbook links as well as translations.

Note

Every subsection (===) gets a page of its own in the Docbook, even if it is part of a longer page on UserBase. This means that a section (==) that contain a number of subsections, but no text before the first subsection gets a Docbook page that contains nothing but links to the subsections.

Remember

If at some point you decide to change the title of the main (sub)section of a page (the first headline), it is important that you also change the name of the page accordingly, and also that all links to that page are modified to match the new name.

Remember

Please do not use any kind of punctuation in your page names — punctuation like question marks or periods creates serious problems for the wiki software, in particular for the translation system.

You will need a scratchpad to experiment with section headings/pages. You can use either your UserTalk page, or the discussion pages attached to the area where you are working. It's helpful if you remove anything no longer required, once the job is completed.

Réaliser un manuel

While developing your manual it is usually best to keep it separate from the regular UserBase content. Some prefer to edit their drafts as subpages of their Talk: page. We also have a special Draft: namespace for this purpose.

To create the content page of your manual, simply write http://userbase.kde.org/Draft:Appname/Manual in the address line of your browser, or place the [[Draft:Appname/Manual]] link in a page and then click it. Either way you will be taken to a page telling you that the page does not exist, but that you can create it clicking a link.

Contenu

• Once you have made the decisions (that can be a lengthy procedure), create appropriate links on the Contents page. It is, of course, possible to insert a section later if you find you've missed something.

Concevoir votre manuel

• Use the red links to create the page, and write up a section at a time.

• Note on the Discussion page anything you will need to refer to later, such as links that can't yet be created.

Remember

) . Cette règle est conforme au formatage wiki traditionnel.

• Faire en sorte que les noms d'applications aient un format cohérent (évitez d'utiliser Amaroks, mais préférez Amarok's).

• Ensure that all images are in PNG format (you can use JPEG as well, but in this case they should be converted to PNG by the script). Save work by converting them before you start .

• Enlever dans les noms d'images, tous les caractères non imprimables.

Chercher dans votre manuel

At some point, you may need to find something that you wrote earlier, but can't remember where. Using the wiki search box may not be ideal unless the string you search for is very specific. You can get much better control over searches using the DPL extension. For example, to find the pages in your manual containing a certain string, you can add the following to any page:

<DPL>
  titlematch = %Appname/Manual%
  namespace = Draft
  include = *
  includematch = /string to search for/
  resultsheader = Manual Pages:
  format = ,\n* [[%PAGE%|%TITLE%]]\n,,
</DPL>

Vous trouverez d'autres exemples utilisant DPL sur User:Claus_chr/DPL.

Preparer le manuel pour la traduction

• The steps for markup editing can be found on Preparing a Page for Translation. Please adhere to that guide, since old markup styles may not still be relevant.

Produire un manuel DocBook

Once your manual is written you can have it transformed into a DocBook manual, so that your work can be used like an ordinary KDE handbook. The procedure is described in this page.