Am Die, 2003-08-19 um 12.19 schrieb Branko Collin: > What it comes down to, I guess, is that Daniel and Mel had a clear > vision of the style of the new user documentation, but I somehow > missed an explanation of that vision.
We started the project by sketching that vision in some files in the CVS
module. I'm totally aggreeing that this not only needs updating but also
to be placed in a more prominent location.
> In an earlier thread, Daniel wrote: "we're not too happy
> with the content and the structure of the GUMP". I take it you meant
> the GIMP documentation?
GUM is the GIMP User Manual, so yes.
> Why are you not too happy about the content and the structure?
It is too anarchic in its sructural layout and Mel didn't like the
language at all. What we imagined was more like a modern manual (in both
content and layout) leveraging all possibilities of modern tools without
the fear to break anything existant (ie. the helpbrowser).
> You also talked about granularity. Apparently, part of your idea of a
> GIMP documentation style is that help pages should be of similar
> size. Could you elaborate about that? Is that what you mean with
> granularity?
Granularity means that an author is not limited to squeeze all
information about a certain topic into exactly the given structure, like
a section; we had great troubles and some not so nice workarounds when
being faced with large topics in the old version. This means that if
something deserves a chapter it'll get a chapter without us having to
worry about how this is transformed into a HTML file with a fixed name
(because it's hardcoded into the GIMP) and referenced later on.
This would be grnaularity on the source side.
Granularity on the output means exactly what you are referring to that
the help chunks are all of the correct size. When the user requests help
on blur the displayed information should resemble exactly that and not
show all plugins with blur somewhere at the beginning. We already agreed
to use HTML with anchors though, so this is something we probably cannot
have easily since it's impossible to control the output granularity on
case-by-case basis.
--
Servus,
Daniel
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