> Actually not. What it is is pointed, and it is not selfish because I > posted on behalf of someone other than myself. It is an attempt to get > others to see the point of view of those who prefer printed manuals > instead of treating their requests as though they don't really matter, > which is how your reply to Jim came off to me, and how almost all of the > previous replies by others on this matter have also come off.
Well, it's a personal preference of some subset of users about how to most conveniently present documentation. On the scale of the needs of Scribus users, it really *isn't* that important. It's more important to have comprehensive documentation at all, rather than focusing on particular forms of presentation. Right now there isn't a comprehensive manual at all, and the documentation that has been written is designed in more of a quick reference style - as befits online help. Writing technical documentation, especially user-friendly technical documentation, is a huge job. It's very difficult to do well, and takes a lot of time. There are generally fewer people willing to volunteer for documentation work. Scribus is, after all, an ALL VOLUNTEER EFFORT. We can't just grab someone and say "You, you're tasked to documentation." I'd love to see a full manual in PDF or any other format. There isn't one, though, and since I lack the time to work on one and my documentation skills are largely limited to smaller scale work, I'm not going to complain about the lack of one. > Two people have replied with links to printable resources. Everyone > else has only spouted excuses as to why there aren't any. I would characterise that as "reasons" rather than "excuses". Excuses imply someone's done something wrong. That is not the case; I'm personally glad we have people interested in working on documentation at all. I've done just enough myself to know that it's difficult and often not very interesting, and all the thanks you usually get are complaints that there isn't more, it's not in someone's preferred format, or that it's either too hard to understand or spends too much time explaining simple concepts. You just can't win. > Those replies are not helpful. Perhaps they are not. They're informative though, if you care to listen. Since the reply you want is not possible without somebody spending months of work that nobody has volunteered to do in order to create the manual you want, it is not possible from your perspective for any reply to be helpful. > If a project as large > and complicated as OpenOffice.org can have a printable manual (which it > does: http://billsey-christian.net/tmp/ShotsOfOOoManual.JPG ; apparently > done largely by one person), certainly scribus can also. Yep, it can. Nobody's jumped up to work on one, though. You certainly don't seem to feel the need to contribute in that manner, only to demand that others donate their time and effort to do so. There is a certain attitude of entitlement here that I see every now and then. I'm not someone who'll try to claim that you have to like something just because you got it for free, or that it's rude to point out flaws - both of those things would be rather silly arguments. I do however think that it's rather rude to respond to people's gift of time and effort by complaining that it's not acceptable and demanding more. A phrase about gift horses comes to mind here. It's really very simple. Yes, it sucks that Scribus doesn't have a manual. It also sucks that it has bugs, including some severe bugs. It sucks that it doesn't have all the features of InDesign, FrameMaker, and QuarkXPress. It also sucks that it lacks the hundreds of people paid to develop these products full time, document them, develop training programmes for them, etc. Those people, however, are expensive, and it very much does not suck that Scribus lacks their price tag. In fact, it exists at all only because people work on it in their own time, for free - out of personal interest, a desire to give back, to improve their skills, etc. Who are you to then complain that you're not getting enough? -- Craig Ringer
