I think we must look at the documentation as an evolutionary process. Prior to the work that led to the printed official manual, there was a consensus that it "couldn't be done" because Scribus was changing too fast. As there is now, there was also a fair amount of inertia.
The issues we had with the publisher of the manual were more of a sideshow than any serious permanently damaging issue. If there was anyone substantially harmed, it was Louis, who ended up printing some copies ahead, and then not receiving promised payment. If there was a disappointment, it was that the necessary price was higher than I would have liked it to be, which further limited the purchases, no doubt. The cost was of course related to the size of the book, which itself related to the inclusion of a lot of background and supplementary material on DTP, color, and so forth. At the same time, this comprehensiveness has repeatedly impressed various reviewers of the book, and I think leads to any timelessness that the book may enjoy. That was then, this is now. At this point, we now have some substantial updating of the online manual, which I think points to a core principle we must work to maintain, that the online docs reasonably reflect the capabilities of the version with which it is included. Something else gained from the more up to date online manual is that other sources of information about Scribus can rely on this information being immediately available to all users, thus another website, another ebook, another printed manual can focus on higher level aspects of DTP principles and omit the nuts and bolts of Scribus features. With the variability in how the various distros seem to be handling the docs, it might make sense to have current versions of the docs available for separate download in some sort of browsable format. Another argument for doing this is that there are typically a number of edits and additions to the docs in svn, which Windows and OSX users will not see until the next stable comes out. I'm currently working on (translation: mentally searching for a congealed mental concept of) an ebook-type manual, probably of a limited breadth, that would serve some purposes as a help to approaching DTP and Scribus in particular. My intention would be to have this available for free, hopefully in ePub and Kindle formats. What license might this have? Good question -- no answer at this time. Greg
