Joshua A. Andler wrote:

Looks pretty good so far... I'll see what I can add to it and take on converting it to an SVG document, but probably won't be until this evening. Two Qs...

1. Does this count as a tutorial? (just wondering if I can use an

existing tutorial template)

Not really. It just explains how the different types of tracing work. A step-by-step tutorial would only last as long as the GUI does not change, anyway.

2. Should I worry about "graphics"? Meaning, should I show examples of

how the settings affect the options? (of course only really showing differences in results, unless it's okay to include raster images... which I doubt we'd want to mess with)

Again, this may not be necessary. The general idea I want people to know, is to start with a light trace, and gradually get darker (more complex) as they become more accustomed to it.

Bob

Joshua A. Andler wrote:

Would this be labeled as something along the lines of a quick-start guide for tracing then? (wondering for the purpose of pretty header and footer, as well as curious as to location in the help menu)

Make it however you want. I just wanted to get something started. If you think about it, currently my main audience is the guys in the project, since some of the concepts in it are so cryptic. This would be good expanded to a more educational document.

I was thinking.... several open source projects are beginning to use OpenOffice for the master copies of their documentation, then converting to whatever they want to deliver (like PDF). Would that make sense here? Or would it be too tedious to convert to SVG? OO has an SVG export, but it has some problems.

Bob

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Joshua A. Andler wrote:

I don't know that it's really wise of me to do this, but I will offer myself up to handle/maintain inkscape's documentation if there is currently no other individual doing so. Currently it appears that everyone chips in (although I may be dead wrong). As I've mentioned before, I'll be fairly useless on the programming side, and if there is a need in this area I'd be willing to step up to the plate. I'm mainly talking about the documentation w/in inkscape, however copying it to the wiki should be relatively simple and I'd be willing to do that as well. Please let me know if this would be helpful or if there is even a need for it or not. And if there is someone who already oversees the documentation, let me know who it is so I can offer up some help.

Yes, this would be a great way to contribute; we definitely need improved documentation across the board. Documentation was very poor when we started, and fortunately it's gotten tons better since we started, but it's far from being where it needs to be.

By documentation w/in inkscape do you mean the items in the Help menu such as the tutorials, or documentation within the inkscape code?

Note that there is also an Inkscape manual that some folks have worked on; this is separate from the tutorials in the Help menu, and definitely welcomes help.

In general we don't copy documentation to wiki, but only because we want to only maintain one copy. If web-oriented versions of tutorials, manuals, etc. can be generated for the website, that sort of stuff is definitely valuable to have set up.

Bryce

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Joshua A. Andler wrote:

...

Yes, this would be a great way to contribute; we definitely need improved documentation across the board. Documentation was very poor when we started, and fortunately it's gotten tons better since we started, but it's far from being where it needs to be.

Awesome, count me in then. Is there currently a main person that is overseeing the documentation, or do all the devs keep up on what's where? (in other areas it seems like you guys know who's doing what, but not necessarily where they are on it)

We don't really have a Documentation Czar or anything. Generally we keep things pretty informal so people are free to work on what they're most interested in. There's a few areas such as translations where we have some contact people, and also around release time we adopt a more formal structure to ensure release quality, but beyond that we prefer the freedom of not having 'managers'.

...

By documentation w/in inkscape do you mean the items in the Help menu such as the tutorials, or documentation within the inkscape code?

Note that there is also an Inkscape manual that some folks have worked on; this is separate from the tutorials in the Help menu, and

definitely

...

welcomes help.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I did mean the items in the help menu, not documentation within the code. I'm really wanting to help with user documentation, and it probably would have made more sense if I worded it that way originally.

For tutorials, Bulia has been most active in overseeing them and ensuring their correctness, so if you're making a tutorial you'll want to run it by him for advice. He also has ideas on how they should be organized, etc. I think he'd love the help but definitely pick his brain first.

And who should I talk with regarding the manual? (who's currently working on it?)

Cedric Gemy is the lead guy on the Inkscape manual effort. Scan through the past months' mail archives for his posts. English isn't his native language so he's been working on the manual in French and is very interested in having help from English speakers. We also need to figure out how to get it included with Inkscape (such as within the Help menu).

Good to know. If only there was real support for SVG within web browsers we'd be set on both ends (using the same files, minus interaction such as the shapes tutorial has).

I've had good luck so far with Konqueror's SVG, however for some reason it doesn't give scrollbars, so if the SVG image is bigger than my browser window I'm stuck. ;-)

Given that I am now going to be involved with the documentation, I'll put some thought into the easiest way to generate the "help content" for the website. And once again, I think that if we have it all based in OO's writer format, it'll be more flexible to do such things.

Cool, that'd be a wonderful thing to sort out. Possibly it can be done with an XLST transformation thingee? Jon Cruz and Bulia may also have some advice on this. Bulia's keyboard shortcuts chart, for example, is generated into SVG, so probably could be modified to write HTML.

Bryce

Personally I like to keep as much as possible as XML for "source", and then use various XSLT stylesheets to generate different versions. I've done HTML, PDF, RTF and others this way.

I'd LOVE to have it this way for tutorials (XML->SVG), but unfortunately the mix of text and Inkscape graphics is too hard to create in XSLT, mostly because XSLT can't get an idea of how tall or wide some element is going to be, but SVG needs absolute coordinates for positioning.

...

Personally I like to keep as much as possible as XML for "source",

and

...

then use various XSLT stylesheets to generate different versions.

I've

...

done HTML, PDF, RTF and others this way.

I'd LOVE to have it this way for tutorials (XML->SVG), but unfortunately the mix of text and Inkscape graphics is too hard to create in XSLT, mostly because XSLT can't get an idea of how tall or wide some element is going to be, but SVG needs absolute coordinates for positioning.

I'm all for XML as source too and would love to see XML->SVG be the process as well. And as John Pybus brought up (in another post), perhaps it can be done with XSL-FO... I'm currently looking into it.

Couple questions regarding XML as source... is there any of our documentation that is currently written in xml (no the svg ones don't count)? Also, will this be handwritten XML or will the fact that OO uses XML suffice for the time being (given that it's relatively easy to extract and manipulate)?

Also, the SVG conversion of the notes on tracing is done excluding the images that were in the original. I wanted to get your opinions on how this should be handled.

1) Do we want to deal with raster images? (as it would make sense given the nature of the doc). One significant difference though is that I would of course use the actual potrace output for the results of the traced images (vs just using the images Bob already prepared).

2) In Bob's more "complex" examples he used the Botticelli Venus, and I'm going to change that unless anyone opposes. I think that vector-loving people associate it with Illustrator.

Let me know and I'll finish this off here this morning.

-Josh

I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but I think that a valuable tool for generating some SVG/Pdf docs might be Scribus. It's not really documentation oriented, but - it is natively SVG oriented - it is a kind of 'sister project' - it allows pdf export until SVG is correctly supported on all platforms/browsers - it allows the use of templates (size of the page; header/footer), and thus allowing to give a visual identity to all inkscape documents.

A major drawback : i'm not sure it runs under windows. (but why not to install Linux too ?)

Regards,

Matiphas

Selon bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...>:

...

Personally I like to keep as much as possible as XML for "source", and then use various XSLT stylesheets to generate different versions. I've done HTML, PDF, RTF and others this way.

I'd LOVE to have it this way for tutorials (XML->SVG), but unfortunately the mix of text and Inkscape graphics is too hard to create in XSLT, mostly because XSLT can't get an idea of how tall or wide some element is going to be, but SVG needs absolute coordinates for positioning.

---

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...

http://www.scislac.com/inkscape/quickstart-tracing.svg There are 3 dependencies if you plan to download, but if you go into

the

...

actual "inkscape" directory on my site you'll see those files as

well.

Excellent! Thanks to you and to Bob. I will add this to the Tutorials submenu.

It is now: http://www.scislac.com/inkscape/tutorial-tracing.svg with fixed header, etc.

...

Since it doesn't really qualify as a tutorial at this point, it is labeled as a "quick-start". I figure it can still go in the

tutorials

...

menu though.

Well, why not tutorial? I'd prefer to call them all the same. It's smaller than others, but it's my plan to break them into smaller parts eventually.

I was just going based on what Bob had initially said, as it he really just wrote it as notes on the subject. But looking at it again, it really is pretty much tutorial material already. Given the tracing stuff will change, I'll continue to maintain and update the doc as necessary.

...

Please let me know what changes should be made.

One type I noticed in the first para: "or now" -> "for now"

done

...

A couple questions I currently have are: What was the font that was used for the word "tutorial" in the

header of

...

the tutorial docs? I'd like to keep the "image" of the docs as

cohesive

...

as possible.

I think you should just restore "tutorial" there :)

done

...

Otherwise, a relatively simple task I'm going to do next is convert

this

...

and the other tutorial documents into basic layered docs if no one

has

...

any issues with it. I figure they will probably need maintenance in

the

...

future, so it would probably help to just get that out of the way.

Yeah, perhaps it would make sense to separate into layers for text, illustrations, headers etc. Also to convert the text to flowText with automatic linebreaks. And maybe make it autogenerated from an XML source (ideally).

I will probably start on converting the tutorials to layers this afternoon. And as for the converting text to flowText... that sounds awesome to me! The only thing is, I'm not aware of how you do that in inkscape (or w/ SVG in general). Is there any UI for it or will it require editing the source (if source, where?). I will also work on the autogenerating from an XML source (but I need to make the XML source first, and I will check out that keys.xml file for reference that you mentioned on the first go-round of this thread).

Bulia, for future maintenance purposes should I just email you updated docs or notify you of URLs? Or is there some other way that I can submit them? CVS perhaps?

-Josh

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Joshua A. Andler wrote:

Bulia, for future maintenance purposes should I just email you updated docs or notify you of URLs? Or is there some other way that I can submit them? CVS perhaps?

Give me your SourceForge ID and I'll give you CVS access if you don't have it already.

Bryce

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 12:48:46PM -0700, Joshua A. Andler wrote:

10 years, 2 houseguests, and 1 new employee (couple weeks of training) later... =)

http://www.scislac.com/inkscape/quickstart-tracing.svg

This is really great! Helped me a lot. (I have no idea what I'm doing normally.)

Please let me know what changes should be made.

In the first paragraph, "or now" should be "for now". Other than that, the only thing I can think of would be "the next step", which would bring it from quickstart into tutorial land, I guess. I'd like to see how to generate a colored version of a traced image. Showing the steps for that would be really cool.