On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Jon Phillips wrote:

Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 11:22:42 -0700 From: Jon Phillips <jon@...235...> To: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> Cc: Inkscape Development Mailing List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] NEW: more stuff in Help menu

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 14:56 -0300, bulia byak wrote:

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On 10/11/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote:

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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

As I said in my other message I was exaggerating but when you say we will still will not have reached 1.0 I am not at all sure you are joking, given how some people seem to resist bumping major version numbers.

If, no when Inkscape covers all of SVG Mobile (it aint tiny) that will be something to celebrate and merit a big 1.0 in my not so humble opinion.

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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.

Inkscape already has way more in the Help menu than most programs but there is very little downside to having a Help menu jam packed full of information. The time wasted by firing up a browser can be mitigated if there is some way for users to spot the difference between fast local help files and slow remote files but all too often the help menus look exactly the same.

I've stated for the record there might be a small downside to having loads of things in the Help menu and good links on the website help avoid most of the usual problems.

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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.

funny example, gimp sucks compared to imagemagick in this regard. imagemagick has much more usable command line arguments to such an extent gimp users and developers regularly recommnd using imagemagick for batch processing. you can still do some very interesting things with gimp scripting at the command line but the base case of converting files from one format to another maybe isn't as streamlined as it should be.

The command line arguments have their place but providing equivalent functionality in the user interface is an easier way to address discoverability and learnability.

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• SVG 1.1 specification at w3.org

Artists are the target users of Inkscape.

Who says that?

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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...

I dont think that is the whole answer, a big part of it sure but when developers actually get down to being users of inkscape the same questions of "who are the users" arises and knowing those answers makes it easier to make the right tradeoffs and know how much or how little technical information to put in certain places.

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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).

Linking to the w3c validator would be a better way to help avoid compliance problems if that is the underlying problem you really want to solve.

Awesome! I love how the simplest feature additions sometimes are the most r/evolutionary...bulia, awesome job on this feature, really!

Very true. I wouldn't care about the details if it wasn't already a great idea. Very inkscape.