On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:51:18 -0700 From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> To: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> Cc: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>, Inkscape Development Mailing List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] NEW: more stuff in Help menu
On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 02:56:18PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
The man page or running inkscape --help are the standard places to find command line help, a menu item would be relatively unusual.
It is relatively unusual for a GUI drawing app to have command line operations at all. None of the commercial ones have them AFAIK. Therefore it is justified to mention them in the GUI because otherwise many people (that might benefit from them) will never even think to look for them.
...or will pop on IRC asking where to find docs.
We've found that there is a non-trivial category of windows users who want to use inkscape in commandline mode, yet who cannot run man inkscape or inkscape --help
Cannot? I accept the discoverability point and I fully endorse having a section in the manual/documentation[1], I was only making the point that a menu item would be excessive (cant have a menu item for everything).
I understand that users might not think to find out about command line arguments but I'm puzzled if there is some technical difficulty preventing windows users from running: inkscape --help
I tried it myself and thought it was some anomoly and perhaps I was doing something wrong. Presumbly there is a bug that needs fixing or some underlying technical problem, which would be an entirely seperate and more fundamental problem.
- Release notes for the current version
Personally I wouldn't consider this as something users would read frequently (more than once even?) and therefore not worth having a menu item.
On the contrary, for many users who are already familiar with the program, it's the most important information in the entire menu. And given the amount of new features in our versions, and their detailed descriptions in the release notes, this menu item will certainly be consulted more than once.
Also keep in mind that this is the definitive location for telling users about "known bugs & workarounds". Having this linked to from the application itself is a very good move.
Okay, in an ideal world we would have a team of documentation writers who would make sure this was all written up nicely in a user friendly way. For practical reasons we are saving a lot of work and directing users straight to the Release notes such as they are.
http://inkscape.org/report_bugs.php
Note the Report Bugs page neither warns people to read the release notes to find out more about known busg and workarounds nor does it warn users that what they might consider a bug is what Inkscape categorises as a request. If there is going to be a menu item directing to the page it is even more important to manage expectations and avoid users getting annoyed when their "bugs" get demoted to the level of feature requests (users really don't like this but they live with it, so being nice and polite helps).
Again there are implicit problems to be solved and adding these links will address part of the problem but by clarifying the problems you are aiming to solve other complementary solutions may present themselves so I hope everyone sees the value in discussing the underlying issues here.
- SVG 1.1 specification at w3.org
Artists are the target users of Inkscape.
Who says that?
Inkscape's defined mission is to be the best SVG editor.
That defines "what" or perhaps "how" but the question of "who" isn't entirely clear.
I don't know if it's going to be a terribly useful link for the average user, but it certainly is within scope of our target audience. I suppose there's a risk that its presence will make people think that Inkscape should support 100% of the features listed there, but I expect most people will simply ignore it. ;-)
A feature you expect most users to ignore ... :(
Okay so this is mostly harmless but I'd hate to see inkscape have features most users were expected to ignore. Before you know it we'll have an installer asking lots of unanswerable questions the first time you run it and you'll think it is perfectly acceptable because most users will just ignore it. Deja vu all over again. ;)
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
[1] I tend to think of Tavmjongs "A Guide to Inkscape" http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/ as the Inkscape book rather than a manual per se. Since the inkscape book cannot be shipped with inkscape people might be inspired to craft a manual, but currently the tutorials are so good and the book is available online there is no real pressure to produce a more conventional boring manual.