On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 14:56 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
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.
And, we will have flying cars ;) By 2016 we will be using 0.54, right? hahahaha
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.
I agree. We could even have an advanced submenu if that is better...really, is it not more helpful to have more help rathr than less! It is about organization IMO and Bulia's awesome addition really cracks this one open IMO.
- 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.
Yeah, I totally agree. This is one area where Inkscape (GIMP) and others really really shine. At siggraph many production companies were into Inkscape and other open source apps because they could do mass amounts of work via batch scripts. Its really in our best interest to pimp these features.
- 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.
Yep, who is doing this? I think mod-rewrite is in order:
RewriteRule ^faq /wiki/FAQ [L,QSA]
Can someone add that please? I'm outta the loop on the new website...
- 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.
Agree.
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.
Agree...
- SVG 1.1 specification at w3.org
Artists are the target users of Inkscape.
Who says that?
Is this really useful to artists?
Yep, I agree. I like how Bryce makes it a point that we really focus on developers. This is really key to getting more features in Inkscape...we have to make it easy for new developers to get involved. and this is really key to our philosophy. More features and developers means way more 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.
I totally think so as well. This is very very key! Plus, it will help us and others find compliance problems quicker (esp. if there are questions).
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 totally agree...this will set a new standard for apps IMO...and is another reason I think our pimped out help/about menu is going to be so great!
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?
Yes, http://openclipart.org/cchost is what we are moving too...it has all of these things. We need more developers to help us in the two remaning areas: thumbnails and moving over our old collection.
Otherwise, I have updated the old site so any uploads we get go into our new system now...so please link to http://openclipart.org
Awesome! I love how the simplest feature additions sometimes are the most r/evolutionary...bulia, awesome job on this feature, really!
Jon