On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Joshua A. Andler wrote:
Yes, this would be a great way to contribute; we definitely need improved documentation across the board. Documentation was very poor when we started, and fortunately it's gotten tons better since we started, but it's far from being where it needs to be.
Awesome, count me in then. Is there currently a main person that is overseeing the documentation, or do all the devs keep up on what's where? (in other areas it seems like you guys know who's doing what, but not necessarily where they are on it)
We don't really have a Documentation Czar or anything. Generally we keep things pretty informal so people are free to work on what they're most interested in. There's a few areas such as translations where we have some contact people, and also around release time we adopt a more formal structure to ensure release quality, but beyond that we prefer the freedom of not having 'managers'.
By documentation w/in inkscape do you mean the items in the Help menu such as the tutorials, or documentation within the inkscape code?
Note that there is also an Inkscape manual that some folks have worked on; this is separate from the tutorials in the Help menu, and
definitely
welcomes help.
Sorry I wasn't clear, I did mean the items in the help menu, not documentation within the code. I'm really wanting to help with user documentation, and it probably would have made more sense if I worded it that way originally.
For tutorials, Bulia has been most active in overseeing them and ensuring their correctness, so if you're making a tutorial you'll want to run it by him for advice. He also has ideas on how they should be organized, etc. I think he'd love the help but definitely pick his brain first.
And who should I talk with regarding the manual? (who's currently working on it?)
Cedric Gemy is the lead guy on the Inkscape manual effort. Scan through the past months' mail archives for his posts. English isn't his native language so he's been working on the manual in French and is very interested in having help from English speakers. We also need to figure out how to get it included with Inkscape (such as within the Help menu).
Good to know. If only there was real support for SVG within web browsers we'd be set on both ends (using the same files, minus interaction such as the shapes tutorial has).
I've had good luck so far with Konqueror's SVG, however for some reason it doesn't give scrollbars, so if the SVG image is bigger than my browser window I'm stuck. ;-)
Given that I am now going to be involved with the documentation, I'll put some thought into the easiest way to generate the "help content" for the website. And once again, I think that if we have it all based in OO's writer format, it'll be more flexible to do such things.
Cool, that'd be a wonderful thing to sort out. Possibly it can be done with an XLST transformation thingee? Jon Cruz and Bulia may also have some advice on this. Bulia's keyboard shortcuts chart, for example, is generated into SVG, so probably could be modified to write HTML.
Bryce