Tasks and Tools

Before you Start

First Things First

• To contribute to TechBase you must register an account.
• Be aware that your contribution will be governed by the twin licenses for which icon-links are provided in the side-bar of each page. Click on the images in the Navigation Panel to read the details. You are agreeing to your contribution being publicly available and that others can use that information on their own sites.

• Use the Talk page to communicate with other contributors or get help. Normally someone will get back to you within a day.

Relevance

It should relate to KDE software, directly or indirectly. We define it like this:

For Potential Contributors - helping to get started

For Existing Coders - keeping documentation of developments

For External Interests - where other projects may have an interest in linking to your work

Not for General Users - UserBase is the place for that

Working with Languages

• Preparing a page for translation needs more patience than skill. If you can spare short periods of time, frequently, this is a very helpful task.
• Translate a page. You need to be fluent in a language, but not a professional translator to translate a wiki page. Translating manuals is the skill of a special team.
• Translate with Off-Line Tools. Get the essentials for Gettext and Import.
• How To Convert UserBase Manual to Docbook gives you an insight into the process that takes place on your finished manual.

 

Remember

It's important to be consistent, particularly in Manuals, so here are some general rules: Take care with heading levels - we start at second level (Mediawiki uses top level for page-name), using == Make sure you refer frequently to this page, Tasks and Tools and to Typographical Guidelines as well as Translation Workflow as new developments will be posted on those pages. Check if all table cells have space after the pipe character. This rule conforms with traditional wiki formatting. Make application name formatting consistent (avoid using Amaroks, do use Amarok's). Ensure that all images are in PNG format (you can use JPEG as well, but in this case you should convert your images to PNG later). Save work by converting them before you start Remove all non-printable characters from image names.

Hints and Tips

Some Preferences that will help -

• If you don't have [edit] links against the sections, open your My Preferences (in the Personal Tools section of the sidebar) then look for Editing and in the Advanced Options set Enable section editing via [edit] links
• While you are in those settings, enable Show preview on first edit - while you are editing you can glance at the original display for reference
• The default display is to show the preview first, with the edit box below. If you prefer the edit box at the top you can change that setting in the same place