On 10/11/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote:
Yes definately. In ten years time that link might break, especially since it links to index.php instead of the relevant directory. Odds are it will break far sooner than that - and who knows what it could get changed to - but once there are Inkscape binaries out there in the wild there will be nothing we can do about it.
Sure, linking to inkscape.org should be preferred, but ten years? I can't imagine anyone will use Inkscape 0.45 in 2016.
For something like command line arguements it might be better to programatically show exactly what arguements are available in the version the user actually has.
You can do that by running inkscape --help. But that information is brief and not detailed.
I would be concerend that Command line arguments should not be needed by most users
They are needed by some, that's enough. We get questions on how to use Inkscape in scripts regularly.
- if many people are using them then batch features of the GUI
would need to be improved.
No, the GUI use and the command line use are quite orthogonal. Both are being improved but they will never converge or replace one another.
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.
- FAQ on wiki
Again I'd very strongly prefer to see a nice clean link pointing at inkscape.org/faq/
Yep, by making that a redirect.
- 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.
Good idea in principle, problematic in practice = bug or feature request? (Mostly a menu item will give you feature requests.)
Real bugs need detailed feedback like stack traces and integration with bug-buddy or similar tools is more likely to result in the kind of high quality feedback you really want.
Sure, so it links to inkscape.org/report_bugs.php which explains all that.
- SVG 1.1 specification at w3.org
Artists are the target users of Inkscape.
Who says that?
Is this really useful to artists?
We have an XML editor in the interface, and this documentation is necessary if only to make sense of what it displays. Surely it's uncommon for a commercial app to link a complete documentation of its file format right in Help, but I don't think we should neglect this opportunity to be better than them. We take pride in using a completely open and standardized format, and we encourage editing SVG both by hand or by other tools in addition to Inkscape - so this menu item is quite relevant.
Also which specification do you link to, there are plenty of variations to choose from and I do think this would be much better served by writing up a page in the documentation.
We use a subset of 1.1, which is why 1.1 is linked. But when we have other profiles such as Tiny, we will make a submenu as Jon Phillips suggested and provide specs for each SVG variety we can handle.
I would urge restraint since I've seen so many crappy programs with links that no longer point to anywhere useful but it is certainly tempting to include a link to OpenClipart.org at least until OpenClipart.org is integrated with inkscape in some other way.
By the way, can anyone update me on the current status and plans of openclipart? Will it have a voting system, user-editable keywords, multiple categories - and if so when?