Re: Introduction

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Feb 01, 2009 at 12:02:14PM +0100, unknown-1 wrote:

     I myself think a good introduction would be helpful. Something like
     "Starting with PSPP" or "PSPPIRE for dummies" (the last is most likely
     copyrighted).

Short phrases like that cannot be copyrighted, but "for dummies" is
almost certainly registered as a trademark in one or more countries.
So "PSPPIRE for dummies" would almost certainly be a trademark
violation.
     
     And now a more difficult point. I myself would like to see the
     documentation in English in html form on a website. If it is available
     this way, the user can use the google translate
     service to have it available in there own language. It might be easy
     to create a webpage with this translations like:

[:snip:]

     There are some issues with this.
     - I don't know if this is legal. But I don't see which copyright is
     violated by this use.
     - I have no idea what the GNU people think of this.
     - The automatic translation is not good, but, it is better than
     noting. I know of people not able to understand a technical page in
     english and with this service they are able to ubderstand more or less
     what it says
     Besides experienced users can issue a better translation to google. (I
     have no experience with that)  My impression is that this google
     service will improve fast.
     
     The benefit is that the translations are available and up-to-date, the
     drawback is they are not good.
     
Any documentation we write should certainly be written in HTML or in a
format which can be automatically translated to HTML.  The prefered
format for most GNU documentation, of course, is Texinfo from which
HTML can be generated using texi2html.

Having said that, I'm not convinced that Texinfo is the most suitable
format for documentation which contains lots of graphics, which of
course  would be rather essential for a manual for PSPPIRE, especially
for the online help documents.  I think some kind of docbook format
might be better, but I'm not very experienced there.

I don't see any point in generating static pages using an automatic
translation service; if anybody wants the translated text, they can
simply run it themselves.  If anybody wishes to translate the pspp
manual (or any GNU documentation) they are certainly welcome to do
so. 

BTW. there is already some documentation in French
at http://cict.fr/~stpierre/doc-pspp.pdf

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