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
