Hi all it’s good to see new threads on this list which to be quiet for a long time. As myself, Prokoudine and Yemanjalisa were previously involved in an Inkscape User Manual, I think it can be interesting to share our past experience in this process and why we failed in having it as an inkscape community project.
First I was doing a manual for Sodipodi, so I found natural to go on with Inkscape after we forked. At this time wiki were not as well known and there was a wish to use an XML technology (you know, this SVGish language!). Benchmarking other documentation project, i found Gimp’s one was good, based on Docbook, with many output capacities. Later, few people came up and many found Docbook to hard to learn just to build a documentation. In the meantime, changes in Inkscape were very numerous and it was too hard to keep the manual up-to-date. One thing we managed to have at this time was getting a good description of new features and changes (not only bug titles displayed in list). This helped a lot and developpers are now going on in the release notes, even if it sometimes decrease. Two main things made the "official" manual fail at this time : - it has never been linked in Inkscape Help Menu, some arguing that Tutorials were enough and some that Tav's book was enough, depending on their point of view. I irced a lot with BByak or JonC but we didn’t get the link. - Inkscape team migrated to launchpad in a time we were out of the process, so that we had the bad surprise to see that the manual had been forgotten and that noone had energy to rebuild it even from archives. Rules to write access changed and i was not elligible anymore… This approximately when Flossmanuals came with a Google rent. The doc team had a few days meeting in Paris to write another documentation using their process. Pygmee (myself), Prokoudine, Yemanjalisa, JFacemayer were involved and we got some results with help from some other contributors, especially, this made Jazzynico join our team and then the dev team. Actually it seems that this manual stayed a foreign project and that nobody had the idea to link Inkscape to it, and that the manual didn’t evolve. The french part of the team has been quite active : - we have a complete introduction to inkscape : http://www.flossmanualsfr.net/initiation-inkscape/ (GPLv2) - Yemanjalisa and Jazzynico have wrote an inkscape book that is now released under free license that is going to be put on the FM website asap All this content, and others, might help build a new User Manual. There are also many content we all have or we can find on the web. I think the real problem is not in content, it is not in technology neither. The main thing to do is to define the goals and get organized. FlossManuals has now a large experience in this process. Especially yemanjalisa who get to manage about 20 manual writing process about several free software (puredata, arduino, blender, scribus…). The general approach is to give readers the key to understand the software (not just show how to do this or that with a somewhat progressive way). I still think it is important to have a link from within inkscape (many people still don’t know how to use correctly a search engine) : this is just a python script to customize but someone would have to commit it For the best pygmee ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor 25 network devices or servers for free with OpManager! OpManager is web-based network management software that monitors network devices and physical & virtual servers, alerts via email & sms for fault. Monitor 25 devices for free with no restriction. Download now http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/292181274;119417398;o _______________________________________________ Inkscape-docs mailing list Inkscape-docs@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-docs
