On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, cedric wrote:
But I've seen on the website that there was a particular wish to publish such a book. I always think precise documentation is a good thing for softwares. This a kind of respect for users (who cannot know everything!!)
And issues : A) Ask for a well known publisher, that will give large diffusion of the book. But regarding at this : 1. Vector drawing is not as popular as bitmap 2. Inkscape is still young and this will be kept as a default and economically very risky 3. Gimp is much more famous than Inkscape, but you can just count books about it with the finger of a unique hand I know some people at Oreilly, I can ask what they think about this, but I've already put it in some discussion and it has never been kept.
B) Do our best to do a self-published one. As a Gimp book author and editor, I have already done this (french only). I still have a free ISBN number that could be used for it. Blender Manual has been made with a subscription. Why not, because it worked ! But the difficulties are : 1. to do advertising for it 2. to a sufficient number of commands to get an interesting price (For the gimp book, there was not enough, so that I've made it in numeric printing which is not the best, especially for pictures)
If there is a particular wish for this, I'm very interesting in working for it. May be may little experience in the subject could be useful. Let me know.
I think a printed manual for Inkscape would be very cool, but so far we've not seen widespread involvement from the community in writing up techniques, etc. Some good work has been done with the manual and tutorials, but not to a scale that would make a book feasible. We have also not seen questions from users in sufficient volume to suggest a book would satisfy a demand. So while I do think it's a good idea, I think there is a lot of risk that the author/publisher would be taking on. It may not make enough $$ back to justify the effort of producing a full printed manual at this time. Maybe within a year there will be stronger support?
Perhaps something could be done at a smaller scale, mid-way between some free tutorials and a complete, published book for sale? For instance, perhaps selling short pamphlets electronically via bitpass? If this small scale effort showed a decent profit, it'd emphasize the viability of someone doing a larger scale book.
Bryce