Celestia Forums

When browsing through Celestia's user's FAQ to avoid posting a topic to the forum where the answer might be already
a topic in the FAQ, I noticed that you have to browse through a lot of irrelevant topics until you find out whether the
one you are looking for is there or not.
My idea:
Isn't it possible that the one who's contributing to the FAQ also puts the Q&A into a certain Class of topics and if
the Class does not already exist he or she will create it.
Thererfor it will be important that there is at least one (or maybe more) moderator(s) to ensure that the classes follow certain
principles/rules to preserve the possibility of keeping track of all topics.

FAQ topic = One Question, different answers, poss. references to other topics.
Class = compound of FAQ topics belonging to the same category

These rules should be:
1. A Class should need an unique identifier (->id number/title).
2. It also needs a description which clearly declares what kinds of topics belong to it (->subject).
3. Different Classes should be disjointed, i.e. there are no topics in them which also belong to other Classes
but there might be references to other Classes.

With this structure it should be possible to find the topic of the category which belongs to one's interest.

References to topics or classes which are related to another one should be realized by hyperlinks.
Maybe this new version of a User's FAQ could be made available for downloading to implement it into Celestia's offline help (FAQ as CHM file ?, or Celestia gets a possibility to retrieve a current version of the FAQ, --> toDoList?)...
Maybe then it could be necessary to put it in a well structured enviroment, other than HTML, to extend this concept (--> XML ?)

Any constructive criticism or more ideas ?

Please contribute to this post if you find this is a good idea (just write something).

hmmm... seems not to be important to you
It was just one of the features I thought which might be useful because a better documentation would mean better publicity in the end 'cause the better the docu the more user use it and the more user the better the publicity and this might mean a greater power regarding development.

I studied computer science and yes, I am able to write programs in serveral programming languages (and I could support this open source project) but instead of adding new features like flashing stars etc... I would work on a better docu starting with the FAQ... You not ?

I'm a bit disappointed that there's no interest.
At least I'd like to know why.

If you mean the "Preliminary User's FAQ", it has that name for a reason.

Its Q/As are in the order of the frequency with which they are (or used to be) asked. For some reason, most of those questions don't get asked any more...

Maintaining and developing a FAQ is not one of my goals in life.
I just got tired of answering the same questions over and over and over.

If you would like to provide a version that organizes the Q/As in way that makes more sense, please don't let me stop you!

[added slightly later]
Celestia already supports links to Web pages (InfoURL declarations in catalogs). There has been some discussion about improving how they're handled, but I don't know how soon those improvements might happen.

I suspect the developers would welcome contributions that would enhance the information display (whether about Celestia itself or about the astronomical objects being drawn) in ways that "make sense".

[added even later]
Please be sure to read through the celestia-developers mailing list archive. There were several discussions about which documentation formats should be encouraged. Usually the celestia-developers list archive is available using a link that's on the page http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=21302, but the SourceForge mailing list archive system seems to be down for maintenance right now.

Sternenfaenger

Actually it is a good idea- but there should be an internal help thing that comes with celestia, instead of a new user having to search the entire net and/or forum to find what they need. At least a page of links to the users guide, faq, seldens addon guide etc etc. It's one of the few basic things that celestia still lacks..

Does anyone have the program used to make windows help files?

Jack,

If you haven't already, please take a look at the developer's mailing list mentioned above (when it becomes available again). The current hope is that the help files and some of the other documentation can be written in docbook format. That format can be processed to create a variety of output formats, including Windows Help.

Actually, I think Don Goyette is looking into generating help files from docbook format. I dunno what docbook utilities he's found for Windows.

Selden
It's still down, but thanks for the link. I'll try again later.

Thank you guys for your fast reply.
I just thought that my request would have been so stupid that nobody wants to answer.
What I was thinking of when posting this wasn't just a FAQ section which can be updated automaticly into Celestia but some kind of huge help section which is just as dynamic like this forum (what I really do like).

Making a static help file for windows (CHM = compiled HTML) is very easy using HTML Help Workshop which is provided freely by Microsoft.

But I would suggest developing a new kind of help system (OS independent) which allows user to rate a topic, so you can arrange topics to relevance.

As you can see my english is not very good but my german might be better, so if anybody needs a german documentation....

Frank has spent a huge amount of time and effort with his 'Celestia' user guides....I've learnt alot from these! Except how not to delete your important files!

With these and Seldens FAQs everything is there!

Celestia can be as complex or as simple as you want...just enjoy!!

Regards...bh.

Greetings,

Sorry to come in late ...

Regarding setting up a complex topic / subject classification system ... this isn't really necessary since the forum (and future help files) have a search function. Click on the Search link at the top of the page and enter the words you want to find. Then, all relavent messages (topics and/or content) will be displayed for you to read through.

Celestia Help files ... yes, this is a topic currently being discussed in the SourceForge Developer's List. Windows Help (.hlp) and HTML Help (.chm) are easy. However, they would be Windows-specific, which is not good. Chris wants all future documentation for Celestia to be in the DocBook format, which is a specific XML DTD, and can be output to many different formats, including Windows Help. I'm not sure if there is a good Help system Style Sheet (.css) out there for DocBook or not, as I've not looked yet.

I *think* I have finally found a DocBook editor for Windows that actually works, and that I like (epcEdit), but it's not free ($99). I like it because it provides a list of currently available sub-entities for the currently active entity, rather than having to use a printout or a separate window to list them all. We'll see.

At this point in time, I am thinking about (not yet working on) an outline for what should be included in Celestia's Help system. The Preliminary User's FAQ topics, content from Frank's User's Guide, and modifying the start.cel script will probably all be part of it. It will be a BIG project to put it all together in a new format (DocBook) and in an organized manner.

Cheers,

-Don G.

Sternenfaenger wrote:As you can see my english is not very good but my german might be better, so if anybody needs a german documentation....

I would like that. Presently I don't have the time to do that by myself, but it would be a good thing.

There was a thread about internationalization some time ago - what has been happend to that? It died?

maxim

maxim,

Celestia v1.3.2 will include support for UTF-8.
Hopefully pre1 will be available soon.

Fridger has rewritten his Locations files to include all the appropriate diacritical marks.

According to postings here on the forum, volunteers translated quite a lot of the text into several different languages some months ago. Presumably those translations will be included in future distributions.