About the technology being used to build Debian Installer Manual
Hi all,
Our team has been customizing Debian Linux for the last one year to incorporate our national language 'Dzongkha'. Presently we are looking at creating Training materials on using Linux operating system especially Debian Linux. The training materials are being targeted for different user groups such as Students, Teachers, Monks, Private IT vendor and Government employees. As such we are hard pressed to analyze the particular needs of each individual target groups and create training material accordingly. Here there are lots of team collaborating on it such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Mangolia etc...
It was decided that
1. To maximize content sharing and re-use. Training content is a
prime candidate for reuse for example, and we plan to build a list of
preexisting reusable content that can in turn be localized by individual country.
2. To create content using standard technologies. Creating content
using word processors for example leads to content that is typically
very tied to vendors and display/rendering systems, and does not
easily lead to reuse. One possibility is to move to an XML based
technology, which allows the content to be independent of target
display system, and can be transformed to the appropriate form (Web/
HTML, Print/PDF, etc) using stylesheets. There are existing systems
which are heavily used by the open source community, and we plan to
create a guide to using these markup languages and tools.
3. Intellectual property issues. If we are translating from existing
content, what is the copyright restriction on that content?A
guideline is to use content under some open content licensing if
possible, and only use proprietary ones when there is absolutely no
choice. We plan to create a set of templates that each country can ask the
publishers to sign to assign copyright or give explicit use
permission, whichever is applicable. One thing to note is that all
content developed will be documented "source" and IP
specification.
4.To come up with a methodology for assessing user needs when
creating content. For this task, we are gathering the published
literature on user needs and requirement assessment and analysis for
content creation
I know that Debian Linux already generates most of its manuals using XML and XSLT. I would be grateful if someone could provide me some details on how it is being used in Debian Linux. It would be helpful even if some one could point me to the right direction and I ll try to figure it out....
Many Thanks
Pema Geyleg
DIT, MoIC
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