Get Involved/documentation

Get Involved with KDE Documentation

Documentation

Writing documentation is a great way to start improving your application and the KDE project. Your words will be translated to all languages covered by the KDE translations teams, and you will be helping millions of KDE SC users 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 list kde-doc-english, learn about mailing lists.

Getting the resources

In order to document KDE projects, you will want to run a recent development version of KDE. To document third-party projects, you will also need a recent version of that program. There is a special KDE DocBook XML toolchain used to create documentation. But feel free to write docs in any format you want, and the team will convert it for you!

The KDE DocBook format

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
• Getting started guide on the internationalization site
• The documentation Primer
• Questions You Should Answer When You Document KDE
• The goals of the KDE Editorial Team
• Crash-course to DocBook
• The KDE DocBook XML toolchain

Tasks

Now you have a recent version of KDE running, you can get you first contribution committed today! Here are some tasks for the beginner:

• 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
• Techbase Documentation page
• Documentation Status
• Mail in your creations to the KDE documentation team.

Mentor program

Getting started in a big project can be hard. Here are some people that are willing to help you one-on-one:

• Burkhard Lück (lueck at hube-lueck dot de)
  documentation
• Yuri Chornoivan (yurchor at ukr dot net)
  documentation
• volunteer to mentor!
  your name here