Hi,
What are your feelings about documentation of Inkscape? Do you think we still need an official user guide that would be available from our main website just like tutorials (in multiple langauges)?
I'm kinda worried about it, because 0.46 will introduce practically all possible SVG filters and there is just no user friendly documentation on them, at least in English (yes, even books on Adobe Illustrator I've seen do not cover them in any decent way, and W3C spec is way too "technical").
Currently we have some ongoing work in French version of the user guide and not much of it in the English version:
http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/inkscape/user_manual/trunk/
Despite of it the situation isn't so bad, IMO. We have pretty detailed release notes that cover a lot of functionality. We could make at least good EN and FR user guides for upcoming 0.46.
What I suggest is trying to do it in small steps:
1. Add both EN and FR user guides to main website in same way we add tutorials. 2. Make them updatable in same way we updated tutorials. 2. Sync them content-wise. 3. Add missing parts borrowing from release notes where required.
This will raise some public interest and, hopefully, attract people willing to contribute (especially if we provide detailed description, how to do it, and define a place where people can meet and talk about docs). Then we can see if we can keep at least EN and FR versions in sync, which, when successful, will be a lot better than no (visible) official user guide at all.
What do you think?
Alexandre