GDP Status Report

1.  Status Reports

Preliminaries

This is the status of the Gentoo Documentation Project. It will be posted regularly, but not with a static frequency. All questions can be posted to gentoo-doc@gentoo.org or to me personally.

The Gentoo Documentation Project, from now on abbreviated to GDP, has its own project page (just like almost all other Gentoo projects). You can find it at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp.

Content

This status mail will briefly discuss the following tasks, objectives and/or projects related to the GDP:

• PDF Documentation
• Translator script
• Gentoo Handbook Development
• Translation-specific requests

2.  PDF documentation

Sadly enough, the previously discussed option (FOP) is a no-go. It requires a working XFree installation, which is not allowed on our webservers. Blackace is checking out if PassiveTex is a better solution, but he is having problems getting pdfxmltex to work (as did I).

Don't expect Gentoo to provide PDFs really soon now. Creating them off-line is no problem (lots of existing solutions) so perhaps some developer might publish PDF versions of documents on his webspace at dev.gentoo.org (I'm checking out if I will do that or not). However, this will *not* be an official location.

3.  Translator script

Xavier Neys has been improving his ruby-script that allows lead translators to quickly grasp the situation of the translation efforts. More information is available at http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.documentation/748.

4.  Gentoo Handbook development

The development of the Gentoo Handbook is continuïng (duh). The second part of the Handbook is progressing, with 5 out of 7 chapters finished. This includes chapters on:

• USE flags
• Portage
• Init scripts

The draft version of these chapters can be found online at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/draft/handbook.xml?part=2

5.  Translation-specific requests

I have asked all translation teams to give some input on how the translation process can be improved, what issues they have and how the documentation team can help more. This resulted in a couple of requests, amongst which are language-specific mailinglists and a GWN request for more volunteers.

The mailinglists for the Polish, German and Indonesian language have been created to improve the translation efforts, and the GWN has asked for extra volunteers for some languages. Some translation teams have already noticed more volunteer requests.