lo Alexander

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)?

It has been mentioned several times, but never done. I guess nobody has time for that. Bryce has already tried to put a drupal somewhere, but nobody really used it.

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").

I'm also worried. I would like to document the filters but it seems i won't have no time until november, at least. And in fact, i would do it well (i hope) for french but my english is so poor taht i just usually use the Release Notes as a basis for he EN version.

Currently we have some ongoing work in French version of the user guide and not much of it in the English version:

We now have a real team for french : With yemanja also writing and some proof-reader. I guess it would be nice if french inkscape user could find the documentation on the official inkscape website instead of coming to mine (at least it is giving me visitors ;) )

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.
3. Sync them content-wise.
4. Add missing parts borrowing from release notes where required.

the more consistent it is the better. I've to check the way tutorials are updated. We were willing to switch to xml2po, but if there is another solution ...

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.

My opinion is that Tav's manual is nice but i can't see the licence (may be i have to search more). But "foreign" should be able to get a manual in their language . If the SVN-manual is more visible, sure that other people will want to contribute to it.

pygmee