Hi everyone,
after sending out the message about having felt a bit lonely while translating the manual, several people sent me some helpful tips on how to do it better :) (Thanks!)
This update message is the incarnation of one of those.
Also, I was very pleased to see that there are so many people still interested in helping, and to see some new people to join us on the Beginners' Guide project. Welcome again, Jabier, Jelle and Marietta!
So, what happened this week? -----------------------------
- Brynn has worked on a friendly news item to get more contributors that will soon be published (find it here, if you're a website editor: https://inkscape.org/en/news/unpublished/812/)
- CR posted a first draft (png) of a cover image, with a tasty Inkscape ice cream (find it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h4n88xpnc6declz/inkscape_cover_beginner_m)
- Jabier has volunteered to work on the CSS a bit, and tested the pdf export, where he found an issue, which, fortunately, we were able to solve (see example pdf of draft from a couple of days ago: http://objavi.booktype.pro/data/books/startwithinkscape-en-2017.06.07 -01.46.42.pdf)
- Jelle offered to help with proofreading, and possibly also with design
- Marietta joined the team, and started out making a public task list (here: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-docs/manuals/issues/, more on that further down) and committed to help keeping it updated. She also proofread one chapter for language inaccuracies, and offered to help with the glossary and testing of the manual's effectiveness.
- Martin (doctormo) helped by giving me permissions to manage the manual task list and members on gitlab
- I have learnt a bit about managing a project this size (at least, I hope I have... let me know when I'm stepping on your toes, please), did some investigation on export formats, helped set up the gitlab issues section, coordinated with members to get them set up, reviewed the news article and translated and technically reviewed 17 chapters, also feeding back to Elisa for the original French version. There are 14 chapters left to be translated, I expect to be done with that in a week, if nobody else joins me there.
- Together we had some good discussions here on the list, that show that work on the manual is very much alive :)
Hope I haven't forgotten anyone, and didn't get the facts wrong - if I have, please blame it on the lack of:
The new task tracker --------------------
Marietta suggested that we have a task tracker to follow up on tasks and to keep an overview about responsibilities. This is a good idea (while currently, I'm still able to keep most of it in my head, that is not a good place to keep records, and to allow people to self-assign and update tasks, and to be responsible ;-) - it may also loose some info here and there), and after a bit of searching, we settled on the *Gitlab issue tracker* for the *Manuals project* as our base.
As Inkscape's code is currently in the process of moving there, website translation files and website code already reside there, and most people who will stay with the project long-term will need an account there anyway, and as it offers some project management functions, this is a good place for keeping log of our progress.
We are still thinking a bit about the most useful way to organize issues there (because of interdependencies).
Everyone in the Beginners' Guide group is invited to create a gitlab account at https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in and to sign up for the tasks Marietta is currently working on adding at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-docs/manuals/issues You can also add new tasks or request access to the team for helping to manage tasks. Please don't take on more tasks than you can work on in parallel. Only sign up for what you are really currently working on. If you want to work on a task in the future, but cannot yet, leave a comment there, so people know who to ask for help.
Kind Regards, Maren