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Writing Open Source Documentation?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm an Open Source guy that runs Linux, and suggests Firefox and OpenOffice to friends. Now, I'd like to give back, but the problem is that I'm not a coder. So, how do I go about writing documentation, and what kind of projects should I look into? What are some stellar examples?"
A cornerstone of documentation in the Unix/Linux/*BSD world is the man page, a very concise and targetted form of documentation that programmers and sysadmins in particular find extremely convenient, especially for documenting library functions and commandline tools.
Unfortunately many FOSS projects don't provide man pages, not even a single one to document the commandline options of an application for example.
This is where newcomers to FOSS technical documentation could make a wonderful contribution. Just take any existing READMEs etc, or run an app with -h or --help or whatever it takes to find out how it's used (perhaps read the sourcefile headers, even if you're not a coder), and make a corresponding man page. That would be totally wonderful, and much appreciated by many.
What's more, there are many tools available to help you along the way. One good place to start is with perldoc/perlpod and the POD format (which are not tied to Perl at all even though they came from that community). These very handily allow you to generate both man pages and HTML equivalents extremely easily, as well as LaTeX format for high quality output and publishing.
As should be apparent, the best documentation system allow you to generate multiple different forms of output from a single input, and man pages + HTML should be the very least that is acceptable to you. (HTML-only documentation is pretty useless in many situations.) Be sure to check out the man2html suite too, which is very handy.
The Doxygen suite is very powerful as well, but automatically extracted man pages are no substitute for the real thing written by a competent technical author. That's where you come in.
It's great to hear of new people wishing to help with FOSS documentation, and man pages are a key element of the overall picture and an easy place to start as well. They really are the bedrock upon which much of FOSS is based, and deserve attention.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Err...actually...you can RTFM on how to write documentation. I should know - I wrote one:
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