Scrollkeeper, the documentation, XML, and the way forward

[Francois Gouget]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Scott Ritchie wrote:

> I wanted the Wine documentation to appear on the nice help menus, like
> other standard apps.  I learned that the way to do this is to write an
> OMF file for each document, which scrollkeeper can then look at to find
> the metadata about where the document is and how to index it and such.
>
> The trouble is, Scrollkeeper and the Gnome help menus no longer support
> SGML, as XML is the current new and hip thing.

Does this mean that scrollkeeper is a Gnome specific thing? I guess 
not since I don't see how such a system should be desktop specific.

I looked at the scrollkeeper website but I did not see how 
applications interface with scrollkeeper. Yet they have to if Wine is to 
appear on the help menus... unless I'm misunderstanding what/where these 
help menus are (quite possible).

>From what I understand the OMF files work just fine with regular HTML 
files. So why not just instruct the packagers to ship an OMF file that 
points to the HTML file we already generate?

Last point: if we convert the documentation to DocBook/XML, can we still 
use po files to translate it to other languages? Scrollkeeper seems to 
have some provisions for localisation but that only seems to extend to 
the OMF files (which probably makes sense).


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                   In a world without fences who needs Gates?