Introduce yourself as an author
Subscribe to the Geany-devel mailing list and write a short mail to the list so that everyone knows you are there, and would like to contribute as an author for the documentation.
Prepare for your work
Note that you will need several tools installed on your system. In particular these are:
The packages are named git and python-docutils on Debian and Fedora systems.
Writing Documentation
Check out current documentation from Git
The documentation is included in the source distribution. Thus, most current documentation is available in Geany's Git repository. To make sure you have the most recent version, check out the master branch of Geany as described on the Git page and then cd geany/doc.
Edit geany.txt
You will find a file called geany.txt, which is the basis of all documentation. It is written in reStructuredText (or "reST"). Feel free to improve this file as you like. To build the related HTML document to see what your changes look like, run "make doc" in the doc directory. This regenerates the geany.html file. To generate a PDF file, use the command "make pdf" which generates a file called geany-{version}.pdf.
Create a patch and send it to us
After you are happy with your changes, create a patch. First, commit your changes, making sure to write a sensible commit message:
% git commit -a
And then export the patch to a file:
% git format-patch HEAD^
This will create a patch file named after the commit message.
Finally, submit that file to the Geany-devel mailing list for review.
Geany