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Translating the Manual

Alexander Barthel edited this page Nov 21, 2019 · 1 revision

First of all: Thank your for your interest in contributing to Little Navmap!

Translating the Manual


Important Note:

Since Gitbook turned to useless with their update to version 2 and since the Gitbook legacy tools are not supported anymore:

Development of the manual has moved to Sphinx and restructuredText. See README-Sphinx.rst for more information about this change.


The manual is written in Markdown on Gitbook which is a fairly easy formatting language saving a lot of time. From there all versions like online HTML, PDF or ePub are generated.

You have to change the Markup sources of the manual since these are the base for all other formats like the website and the PDF. Do not edit the PDF Files.

Notes:

  • Do not translate file names. The README.md and SUMMARY.md are needed by the GitBook system, for example. Changing the file names will also break the help links in the program.
  • Be aware that the menu, button and other names in the text are not translated only, but shall also the same as in the program.
  • Do not translate the anchors (e.g. {#file-quit}). They are used in the documents to link to each other and are also used from within LNM to jump to help topics. These should not be translated.
  • File encoding has to be UTF-8. You can use Notepad++ to change the encoding for example. The recommended editors ensure that UTF-8 is used.
  • Do not simply run the text through translator programs. This will result in low quality.

There are two ways to access the manual sources:

Check out from GitHub

This is the preferred method since it allows to work with GitHub push requests and does not need an extra account on GitBook.

The two manual repositories are linked to GitBook and synchronized from GitHub to GitBook and vice versa:

Little Navmap User Manual

Little Navconnect User Manual

Check these out using Git (preferred method) or download them as a Zip archive. Once done issue a pull request or send me the translated sources.

You can use Git or TortoiseGit to fetch the sources.

Markdown Editors

Haroopad - Windows, macOS and Linux
Remarkable - Windows and Linux
ReText - Linux

There are more and you can also use a plain text editor.

Testing the Manual Locally

If you have Linux you can install the Gitbook tools to test the manual on your computer. I'd recommend to use a Ubuntu 18.04 LTS virtual machine.

The link to the Gitbook toolchain installation is not available anymore since Gitbook got greedy and changed to a closed system.

Installing GitBook is easy and straightforward. Your system just needs to meet these two requirements:

  • NodeJS (v4.0.0 and above is recommended)
  • Windows, Linux, Unix, or Mac OS X

Install with NPM

The best way to install GitBook is via NPM. At the terminal prompt, simply run the following command to install GitBook:

$ npm install gitbook-cli -g

gitbook-cli is an utility to install and use multiple versions of GitBook on the same system. It will automatically install the required version of GitBook to build a book.