KDE
Get Involved with KDE Documentation
Writing documentation is a great way to start helping your application and the KDE project. If you decide to help out, your words will be translated to all languages covered by the KDE translations teams, and you will be helping thousands (millions?) to better understand their desktop and applications. Anyone with reasonable English skills and good knowledge of an application can help.
There are two kinds of documentation in KDE. Context help explains individual GUI items on the screen, see Aaron Seigo's guide on this. The remainder of this page focuses on help documents (application manuals), which include screenshots and explain an application's features and overview.
Communicating with the team
There are many ways to get in touch with the team:
You can chat with the team in #kde-docs on irc.freenode.net, or learn more about IRC.
The team discusses activities on the mailing lists kde-docbook and kde-doc-english, learn about mailing lists.
Getting the resources
In order to document KDE projects, you will need to run a recent development version of KDE. To document third-party projects, you will also need a recent version of that program. There are also special tools to create documentation. Together, these make up: The KDE DocBook XML toolchain.
Guides
We use the DocBook XML standardized format, which allows for ease of translation using our custom tools. The markup is extremely self-descriptive, and many people find it easier than HTML to learn. However, if you are not familiar with it, please read up about it below. To produce quality documentation, please have a look at these guides:
- DocBook Crash Course
- The KDE Style Guide - a complete guide to KDE documentation
- The KDE DocBook Authors guide - covers the minimal customizations KDE makes to the DocBook DTD, and the conventions we use within our documentation
- The screenshots specification
- KDE Markup Guide - further information
- Documentation HOWTO - more information that should be copied here later
- Getting started guide on the internationalization site
- The documentation Primer
Tasks
Now you have a recent version of KDE running, here are some tasks for you:
- Open Documentation Tasks - a list of the few documentation priorities
- Bugzilla listing of screenshots that need to be fixed
- Bugzilla listing of documentation that needs to be updated
- Bugzilla listing of applications missing documentation
- Mail in your creations to the KDE documentation maintainer.
Mentor program
Getting started in a big project can be hard. Here are some people that are willing to help you learn the ropes and get you on board:
- Philip Rodrigues (phil At kde DOTT org) - documentation, bug triaging
- Sebastian Kügler (sebas AT kde DOTT org) - promotion, non-technical and organisational questions
- volunteer to mentor! - your name here
