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At second glance, it's still not a great way to
go, but if it's all you can do...
I think the key to making it work would be if
the screens/dialogs you were documenting had
some individual, unique identifying features,
other than the text (i.e., layout, color, graphic
elements).
In other words, if the layout and non-text content
of each screen would help visual recognition, then
it might be worthwhile to provide "greeked-out"
views with circles and arrows to each relevant
field and feature, nicely explained in your doc
text.
Of course, if every new screen looks very much
like the last one, then there's no value to
having a picture, because it conveys no useful
info without readable text.
Probably the ideal solution would be for you
to have the same GUI-creation tool that the
engineers use, and to have all the messages
and prompts in a separate, referenced file.
Then, you could just have the file translated.
Then, you'd run through your sequence of steps
(that you are documenting in your manual) with
a script, replacing the text/message file with
a new language version on each run-through, and
zapping the screen-caps as fast as you can step
through the script.
If you aren't using something like Qt or Tcl for
GUI-creation, then the above model falls apart
if your system is implemented on multiple platforms.
/kevin
> -----Original Message-----
> From: B. Pfister [mailto:bpfister -at- frii -dot- com]
> Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2000 7:54 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: localization question
>
>
> I am about to localize a software product for several languages. The
> engineers want to know if I want them to use some sort of tool that
> will turn the dialog box text into gibberish for my screenshots. The
> idea is to get one set of shots. While it's cheap, I'm just not sure I
> like the idea. Is this something any of you have done?
>
> Betsy
>
>
>
>
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