Re: adopting the Style Guide

["Rebecca J. Walter" <rjp mail tele dk>]

On Tue, 2001-10-16 at 02:15, Christian Rose wrote:
> "Rebecca J. Walter" wrote:
> > > Maybe you can share with my why the GIMP documentation project chose to
> > > undertake this arduous task.
> > 
> > We didn't.  I didn't even know that was happening until now.  We have 1
> > writer right now.  He is trying desperately to get everything covered.
> 
> I probably shouldn't jump into this discussion, but wouldn't it be
> easier if the GIMP Documentation Project and GNOME Documentation Project
> joined forces? To me it seems like an unnecessary burden to have to
> distinguish the two, with seperated guidelines, discussions, procedures,
> etc.

Basically, no.  For one simple reason... GIMP is not GNOME and many
GNOMErs refuse to believe that. We appreciate the wisdom and advice
offered by the GNOME Documentation people... and most likely the GIMP
style guide will end up something like "Refer to section X, Y, and Z of
the GNOME Style Guide" followed by our own word list and stuff.  

Yes, GIMP is accepting the services of the GNOME translators.. at the
moment.  Mainly because Sven has too much on his plate and the GNOME
translation teams have CVS access.  But some of the dedicated GIMP
people are considering taking over the role of GIMP translation
coordinator.

GIMP Help needs to stay separate. Our needs are far too different and
are not understood by a lot of the people on this list.  Our help is
distributed to every GIMP user... including the Windows ones.  We have
our own help browser and users can choose to use a web browser of their
choice.  We are trying to create documentation that it useful on the
computer but can also be printed.  (we have pdf conversion tools)  GIMP
is a much more specialized program than GNOME.  

I hope in the future if Scrollkeeper becomes widely used and has a
stable and fast browser to make our docs also scrollkeeper compatible,
possible replacing the help browser with something else, but for now
things are very different in that direction as well.  Our structure
might also be different although I'm not sure.

It is best if we are two separate projects that work together
sometimes.  GIMP Help needs the advice of the GDP sometimes, but we are
not GNOME!