On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Daniel Klein wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
By the way... Something the project needs pretty desperately right now are written articles about the application. I've gotten one published (http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7241) but we need more, especially from the 'new user' perspective. If you'd have any interest in doing so, it'd sure help raise awareness of the app!
The only thing I do semi-well is writing. (http://bringa.deviantart.com if you want to prove me wrong :P). The problem I see is that I won't invest a LOT of time into this.. the comic is ONE of my many projects, on the priority list it's around 5. That means I'll do the occasional page layout in inkscape and maybe sketch a scene in it as well now and then, but I can't really see myself diving much deeper into it. (although, today at work, when I had to come up with a random background image to prove that something I wrote worked on top of an image, I used inkscape to create an aesthetically pleasing background [boss: 'cool, where did you get that background from?'] and when I later had to write some geometrical algorithms and I wanted to visualize just what I was doing, I used inkscape for sketches as well.. ahum.. :P) However, I'd love to give something back to the community, and I believe that even as a non native speaker I should be able to write the odd article. Tell me what kind of audience those would be intended for and what kinds of things I should cover, and I'll be glad to help :)
Sure, the audience depends on the publication you'd be shooting for, of course. OS News tends to be fairly Linux/Development oriented, so I focused my article a bit on the open source development process aspects.
An audience I think that would be worth targeting are users who aren't artists but occassionally need something aesthetically pleasing for diagrams, presentations, etc. and want to do it using Open Source tools, the same way you are. So it might explain what vector drawing is and gives some real-world examples of using Inkscape to get these kinds of jobs done. Most people understand the basics like rectangles and circles, but what about variable transparency (aka alpha blending), bezier curves (aka node editing), and so forth? For examples, you can mine the materials at openclipart.org, or I'm sure some of the other users could contribute a piece or two.
A good time to shoot for with an article would be after the 0.39 release is out.
Bryce