Hi :o) On Sat, 2006-07-22 at 19:32 +0100, Joachim Noreiko wrote: > --- Matthew Paul Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Hi Joachim > > > > While browsing mail.gnome.org archives I came across > > this message of > > yours from March 27, which never arrived in my Inbox > > for some reason: > > > > > > --- Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com> wrote: > > >> > > >> Subject 10 also suffered severely from Free > > Software help writers' > > >> continuing weakness for including full-size > > screenshots in their help > > >> -- FFS, stop doing that!) > > > > > > Just so I've got this right -- you want FEWER or > > NO full size > > > screenshots in the docs? How about practically no > > screenshots at all, > > > of any size? That would be fine by me, as they're > > a pain to make, > > > maintain, and translate. > > > ... > > > > Before the BetterDesktop studies, other studies had > > also found that > > people confuse screenshots with the actual > > interface. > > <http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Ab7nx7LLa3EJ: > > www.infomanagementcenter.com/enewsletter/200411/ > > > secondary.htm+%22even+fairly+sophisticated+users+were+clicking+the+graph > > > > ic%22> > > > > More about avoiding screenshots: > > <http://g2meyer.com/usablehelp/singles/263.html> > > > > When screenshots really are necessary, I suggest: > > * crop them to only the relevant control or window > > area > > * reduce them to 75% or so (as mentioned in the > > thread) > > * make them fade out on each side, so they look > > even less like a real > > window > > * make them short looping animations (about 1 > > fps), when appropriate > > for illustrating a process. > > I *knew* I'd read about scaling them down somewhere! > I was asking about this on IRC the other day and > nobody else had heard of it. > > I'm away right now -- could someone copy the salient > points and links of the above to a new bug, so we > don't forget -- file against either the Doc Handbook > or the Style Guide, I forget which one talks about > screenshots.
I've commented on this in the bug report [1]. To resume I think that scaling screenshots makes them look bad. Perhaps yelp could dress screenshots so as to help distinguish them from windows. Perhaps a simple border could suffice, maybe integrating the title. I think it would be interesting to look into this. > > An even better approach would be to add to yelp and > > GTK the ability to > > walk you through the real interface without > > screenshots. For example, > > in a "How do I send customized letters?" help page > > for Abiword, > > clicking a "Guide Me" button might highlight the > > "Tools" menu, then > > highlight the "Mail Merge…" item in the menu once > > you opened it, then > > wait for you to choose a file before describing the > > next step, and so > > on. > > That's probably for even beyond Mallard... I think that with dogtail, this could actually not be too hard. At least not as hard as Mallard ;) Love, Karderio [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348495 _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
