Re: General GNOME User docs

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, Alexander Kirillov wrote:

> Here are my thoughts:
> 
> I have no objections to users guide, but I personally would hate to
> update it for 1.4 - merging in all the new material about nautilus
> etc. If dave will do it - great.

As for merging the Nautilus docs... We probably would want to put a
stripped down introduction to Nautilus in there. (Not that it is any
easier.)

Dave - What do you think?  Are you interested in working on a UG for 1.4?

> On the other hand, talking about a "comprehensive" desktop doc - do we
> really need it? "Comprehensive" means it must include all about
> nautilus, all about panel, sawfish (like it or not, window manager is
> as important as file manager), probably some key applets, such as
> taskbar, maybe even  control-center... Isn't it too much?
> ANyway, in the current form users-guide-1.2 is not so much users guide as a
> reference manual, useful for looking  something up, not for reading as
> one document. 
> 
> I'd rather vote for having a short "intro to gnome" with links to
> manuals to individual components (panel/nautilus/...), and 
> a common index covering these core documents. This is as good for
> looking something up as a single comprehensive doc ans much easier to
> maintain - not to mention that this way, we do not duplicate other
> documents.  

I think we definitely want the "Intro to GNOME". We need something a
windows convert can read in less than an hour (or even 15
minutes?) and come out knowing what GNOME is, what you can do
with it, and how to do the basics like logging in, logging out,
customizing the Panel, moving around the filesystem, and launching
applications.

> One thing for which users guide can be really useful is as *printed*
> manual. But shipping it as html files the way it was in 1.2, IMHO, is
> inefficient use of our own (dcm's first of all) time and bandwidth. 

If we need the UG for printed and/or the web (which I think we do), then
we have to make it regardless of whether we ship the HTML.  As at least
some users will find value in it, and probably a significant fraction of
GNOME users, we should probably ship the SGML/HTML if we produce a UG for
print/web purposes.

> Another thing: I am not sure about shipping glossary - at least, not
> until nautilus people make some interafce for looking up in the
> glossary  an unfamiliar word in docs. We discussed several ideas about
> this before, but it doesn't look like they will make it in 1.4.  

If we ship it in 1.4, it would probably just be a static document - not
really integrated into the help system.  If it is ready to ship as a
static document, we can include it.

[snip]

Dan