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New user guide

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2006-01-17
2017-11-30
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  • Matthew Gates

    Matthew Gates - 2006-01-17

    There's a new version of the user guide available in source and html form:

    http://porpoisehead.net/mysw/index.php?pgid=stellarium_user_guide

    Note that the new PDF file is NOT linked to from the page above since the traffic was killing my little web hosting account!

    Please can the Stellarium website maintainer copy the PDF to the Stellarium site? The new version PDF can be found here:

    http://porpoisehead.net/mysw/downloads/stellarium_user_guide.pdf

    My thanks to Barry Gerdes for his excellent and extensive contributions!

     
    • Johan Meuris

      Johan Meuris - 2006-01-18

      Great news!

      I copied the new user guide to Stellarium.org

      http://stellarium.org/stellarium_user_guide.pdf

       
    • Nobody/Anonymous

      Hi!

      Is there a german version of the user guide available? Or is it planed?

      Ernie from Germany

       
    • Matthew Gates

      Matthew Gates - 2006-01-29

      As far as I know there are presently no translations of the guide. The old language joke:

      What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?
      - bilingual

      What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages?
      - trilingual

      What do you call someone who speaks 4 or more languages?
      - a polyglot

      What do you call someone who speaks one language?
      - English.

      Sadly this applies to me. However, if anyone would like to do a translation that would be great! We should think about how to arrange it. I don't know if LyX has any features to allow multi-language versions of documents.

       
      • András Mohari

        András Mohari - 2006-01-30

        I'll probably try to translate it into Hungarian, though I'm not too good at finishing things...

        I'm afraid LyX doesn't handle multi-language documents, so people have to copy the English guide and start writing it over...if that is what you meant when you said `I don't know if LyX has any features to allow multi-language versions of documents.' This means that keeping translations up to date with the English guide is not too easy. Does anyone have a diff program for LyX? :-)

        The more problematic stuff is, or might be, latex2html. I had some bad experiences with it some years ago, when I fed it a Hungarian language document... Post-processing the generated HTML was definitely a nightmare. I don't know if things are better now.

        (Off topic: By the way, have you received the Windows installation instructions & screenshots that I sent you a long time ago?)

         
        • Matthew Gates

          Matthew Gates - 2006-01-31

          Hungarian - great!

          As for a LyX diff, there is normal diff - LyX is a text based format - but interpretting the output is likely to be quite hard. I know what you mean - it'd be a very nice feature to have a graphical diff tool within LyX.

          [checks LyX site]

          Wow, the development version of LyX (1.4) has change control built in... nice. Looks like LyX is getting quite active recently.

          As for the latex2html, we'll just have to give it a try. It's likely we can find another way to generate HTML if necessary.

          --
          Matthew

           
        • Matthew Gates

          Matthew Gates - 2006-01-31

          The windows install screenshots... I got information in word format, but it's not easy to extract the images from this.

          After a little thinking I decided to keep the installation instructions down to a minimum. I feel a little silly after requesting someone send me the screenshots, so my apologies if I wasted some time.

          Part of the reason is that I thought that if I provide windows screenshots, I should do the same for other platforms and then it'd make for a HUGE PDF and honestly it's so easy that it's not required...

          --
          Matthew

           
          • András Mohari

            András Mohari - 2006-01-31

            "[...] my apologies if I wasted some time."
            No problem, I just didn't receive any response, not even a mailer daemon error or something, that's why I asked.

             
    • Nobody/Anonymous

      Hi
      presently I'm translating the guide in italian, but as far as I'm concerned, as I think that the astronomical elements can be found anywere, for now, I will proceed with the program guide only.
      May be later on I will add the rest.
      Paolo

       
      • Matthew Gates

        Matthew Gates - 2006-01-29

        Fantastic news! You're right - the only bit which is really necessary is the program specific information. I'm aware that I'm duplicating a lot of information available elsewhere (and probably far more accurate and written with better style).

        I started out by trying to explain a few concepts needed to understand program features. For example Alt-Azi/Equatorial coords... I got a little carried away!

         
      • Nobody/Anonymous

        Sorry for the delay,

        but be patient, do not despair, I'm going on, slowly, but going ;-)

         
        • Matthew Gates

          Matthew Gates - 2006-03-14

          Hi,

          If you send me anything that you have we can start to build something in the CVS. Are you using LyX?

          The French translation is nearly up to date with the English version now. To see how we have arranged it, see here:

          http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/stellarium/stellarium_user_guide/fr/

          As you can see, we created a "fr" sub-directory and kept the English file names, but prefixed them with "fr_". Images that need translating are included in that directory, non-translated images are referenced as ../imagename, so we don't have to duplicate them.

          If you would like and assistance, feel free to mail me: matthew[at]porpoisehead.net

          Enjoy,

          Matthew

           
    • Nobody/Anonymous

      Hi
      While going through your guide for italian transaltion, in the Text User Interface Menu I found two 7.3 items:
      - update me via Internet
      - set locate
      is this Ok?
      Paolo

       
    • Matthew Gates

      Matthew Gates - 2006-02-13

      I think the "set locate" is meant to be "set locale" (my typo).

      The "Update me via Internet" is the correct text - it is that is in the menu, although I don't think it does anything in version 0.7.1 of Stellarium.

       
    • Nobody/Anonymous

      OK Matthew,
      but what Have I to do? Change the second 7.3 in 7.4 or?
      Paolo

       
      • Matthew Gates

        Matthew Gates - 2006-02-14

        I'd leave them both as 7.3. The guide should accurately represent the state of the software. It might be worth adding a footnote to say this is a known bug.

        Matthew

         
    • András Mohari

      András Mohari - 2006-03-15

      Hello,

      The forum link in the user guide is broken. It should be

      http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=278769

      and not

      http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=27876

      (notice the missing "9" at the end).

       
      • Matthew Gates

        Matthew Gates - 2006-03-15

        Well spotted.

        How's is that Hungarian version coming along? Are you using LyX?

        If so, you can see how I think the files should be arranged from the French translation which is now in CVS (we're still working on a few details before release of PDF, but you can get a good idea of how to arrange/name the files).

        Cheers,

        Matthew

         
        • András Mohari

          András Mohari - 2006-03-15

          Well, I'm still quite hesitant about the documentation format. I've translated some parts of the guide, but I wasted a lot of time trying to find the "perfect" tool -- LyX, pure LaTeX, OpenOffice.org, DocBook XML, asciidoc (converting from a neat ASCII markup to DocBook)...

          The problem is that I can't seem to have good HTML and good printable output at the same time. Not in Hungarian, at least. So I'm basically just hovering between these two courses. I should decide...

          I've been in favour of LyX (ie. no browseable documentation) lately, but typesetting long URLs can be a pain. (Plus you need to install the MagyarLaTeX package for Hungarian typesetting, and you also need to replace makeindex with an alternate implementation to sort the index properly.)

          As for the translations in CVS:
          1) Do you really need the language prefix even if the files are in their own directory?
          2) Could I use whatever directory layout I prefer under the (so far theoretical) hu/ directory? (LyX input files and localized figures would be in their own sub-directories.)
          3) Can I change the section numbers? (For example: "Introduction" is so short that it should not be numbered, IMHO.)
          4) Can I omit sections/chapters? I'd like to concentrate on Stellarium, so I would probably omit the astronomy guide etc.

          Oops, I'm getting quite lengthy, so I better finish now.

           
          • Matthew Gates

            Matthew Gates - 2006-03-15

            I understand very well the indecision about format. I initially made the guide using TeXmacs, but changed to LyX when I had problems with tables that I couldn't fix. LyX isn't a whole lot better for tables.

            It's enough of a pain in the backside to find something that works properly in the English language, so I imagine the extra complication of i18n makes this more painful...

            In answer to your questions:

            1) I suppose it's not necessary. It's helpful in one way - the document list in LyX only shows the basename, so flipping between files is easier this way. A translated file name would also help this, but it would confuse me until I learnt the translations for the file names. I'm happy for it to be the choice of the translators, but bear in mind answer 2 as well...

            2) This is OK. However, I'm creating a makefile to generate the .pdf, .html from the source files (and svg->png where appropriate). Keeping as similar to the English version structure will make maintenance of the makefile easier.

            3) Again, I think it's the choice of the translators. When I make changes to the original, I'll send out mails saying what's changed, so keeping the section numbers in sync might make this easier... It's up to you.

            4) I don't see why not. Any translation work is a good thing, and it's true that some sections are more important then others. The whole astronomy guide can all be found elsewhere - on the net, in any half-decent beginners astronomy book etc, so it's not really necessary. I just started typing and came out. :)

            Matthew

             
            • András Mohari

              András Mohari - 2006-03-15

              It is indeed painful. Frustrating, to be exact. :-/

              In response to your answers:

              1) I'm not in favour of translating filenames either.
              2) OK. Altough LaTeX to HTML conversion is out of the question in case of the Hungarian translation. Even LaTeX to PDF would not work properly without installing MagyarLaTeX and husort.pl (a makeindex replacement). :-(
              3 and 4) OK.

              Thanks for answering.

              (I'm also having a look at the links Fabien provided.)

               
              • Matthew Gates

                Matthew Gates - 2006-03-15

                If you can mail me an example Hungarian LyX file I will install these and make sure I can generate Hungarian PDF.

                The PDF version of the guide is far more popular than HTML, so it's more important. HTML is useful for giving people links in forums to a specific section, but apart from that I don't think many people use it very much.

                 
          • Fabien Chéreau

            Fabien Chéreau - 2006-03-15

            Dear all,

            Do you know that there are some dedicated tools for multilingual document management such as open-language-tools which is free?

            https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/
            Matthew you should have a look at that.

            There are also some other links at the end of this wikipedia article : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_memory

            Fabien

             
            • Matthew Gates

              Matthew Gates - 2006-03-15

              mmm, I shall have a look. Could be useful, thanks!

               
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