GnuCash Documentation Project

This page is the home of the Gnucash Documentation Project, our goal is to maintain a community of people working towards creation of high quality documentation for GnuCash.

Everything you need concerning GnuCash documentation should be here, if you notice something missing, email gnucash-devel and we will add it.

Nightly Documentation Builds

current unstable user documentation and developer documentation

Every night a server builds the documentation from the current contents of the GnuCash subversion repository. This includes the Developer Documentation from Doxygen and User Documentation for the current unstable version of GnuCash.

Nightly Documentation Builds:

GnuCash v2.2 (current stable release)

If you have a question about how to use GnuCash, you are in the right place. The first thing you should do is read the Help Manual and the Concepts Guide, most of your questions can probably be answered by these documents.

The Help Manual is designed to be a quick reference of how to accomplish specific tasks and how to use the features in GnuCash. The Concepts Guide is designed to be an in depth guide to the concepts behind using GnuCash with a tutorial to show how to put those concepts into practice.

Help Manual: English (HTML) | Deutsch (HTML) | Italiano (HTML)
Concepts Guide: English (HTML) | Italiano (HTML)

Please send an email to the gnucash-user mailing list if you cannot find a satisfactory answer to your question within either the Help Manual or the Concepts Guide. We want feedback from you, it is only through your comments that we know how to modify the documentation.

Additionally, you can talk to someone via IRC at irc.gnome.org channel "#gnucash" about your question. Another resource is the English or Deutsch GnuCash wikis. A wiki is an interactive website where registered users can ask and answer questions.

Some people have written HOWTO guides or tutorials. Note: the information presented in these sources may or may not be updated to the most recent version of GnuCash. If you are interested in doing development work on these documents, you should contact the original authors.

Older GnuCash Documentation

This section contains all the older GnuCash documentation. If you are using one of these old versions of GnuCash, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to the latest stable version.

GnuCash v2.0:
GnuCash v1.8:
GnuCash v1.6: English | Deutsch | Espagnol | Português

Documentation Development

Introduction

The GnuCash documentation is stored in xml files. More precisely, it uses the GNOME2 XML docbook system. This is a relatively flexible system that takes xml files as input and can generate documentation in several different output formats (html, pdf,...).

If you wish to review or write GnuCash documentation, you will need to know xml. Some basic knowledge of the docbook system may be useful as well

The following links are for further sites that can help with the documentation and review process.

DocBook: The Definitive Guide.
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide.
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
How_to_translate_the_GnuCash_guide_and/or_help_files: While this GnuCash wiki page is really about translating the documentation, it holds some useful information on working with docbook files.

We suggest also subscribing to gnucash-devel.

Gnome Documentation guidelines

As stated earlier, the new docs are based on the GNOME2 XML docbook system. Everyone wishing to help please follow these guides where possible when reviewing and/or writing docs.

Where to get the documentation source

You will need a recent copy of the documentation source. For this you can check out the documentation module from the GnuCash svn. Reviewers could also start from the current docs tarball.

For those not familiar with svn, the GnuCash wiki has a description tailored to the GnuCash code. To get the documentation source instead of the program source, replace 'gnucash' with 'gnucash-docs' in the mentioned svn commands, like this:

svn checkout http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash-docs/trunk gnucash-docs

Writers

Get a copy of the documentation source as described above and start making changes. When you are satisfied with your changes you can create a patch by running the following command in the base directory of the documentation (usually gnucash-docs, unless you renamed it):

svn diff > my-patch-name.patch

The usual procedure for contributors to GnuCash is to initially submit patches to the gnucash-devel mailing list. We will handle getting the patches added into svn until you are given an account. You can also add the patch to a bug report in bugzilla.gnome.org if you wish.

Please let other writers know which section you wish to tackle. Please forward this to gnucash-devel so that people can say 'hey I'm doing that already' or 'go ahead and do it'.

You may also want to retain a local copy of the old documentation to refer to when writing. This still has a lot of useful information in it which hasn't been transferred to the new docs

Reviewers

Get a copy of the documentation source as described above and start commenting on it.

The best way of retaining comments about docs in an easy to find way for everyone would be to use bugzilla.gnome.org to file the bugs under documentation. This can also be done using bug-buddy.