Hi, Over the past few weeks, I've been designing and implementing a new tool to improve the quality and quantity of documentation for Gnome, by greatly enhancing the workflow of documentation. It's called "Tuxtorial", soon to be in alpha at http://tuxtorial.com . It aims to crowdsource the creation of screenshot supplemented tutorials by means of a specialized clientside tool and a system to host them online. The current workflow to create an image supplemented tutorial is cumbersome. Screenshots are captured at key points, saved, opened in external tools, edited one by one, and uploaded painstakingly to FTP or any online image hosting service. And writing documentation comprises of writing markup in HTML/Markdown/Mallard, and inserting the exact URLs of each image, which can prove to be an inefficient and gratifying experience. A user can download tuxtorial's client software and install it. It runs natively in the GTK environment, and hides itself on start. The user simply hits a keystroke on each point, when the screenshot is unobtrusively captured. When finished, the user opens up the "Storyboard" where he/she can edit images by means of a few inbuilt specialized tools. The user can add a snippet of text for each screenshot, as an instruction. Since the data is available in a semantically clean format, it can be converted into HTML, PDF, ODP, etc. Most interestingly, I will support the ability to directly upload the tutorial to tuxtorial.com and is visible by anyone who wishes to learn from this tutorial. Clearly, this is a far superior method of creating documentation, and since all non-human elements of the workflow are eliminated, I'm speculating that less technically skilled people will be able to share their knowledge and upload to the site, which can pass community review, and eventually make it's way into yelp. I am doing this and other Linux documentation related work as part of my post-college Startup company. While almost all the code will be free software, I do intend to make the venture slightly profitable. Converting this work into a Summer of Code project for Gnome would really help with my living expenses initially, so I wished to pitch this idea forward for community review and feedback. Of course, I will continue regardless of the outcome of my application. Looking forward to your feedback, Anirudh (antileet on #docs) P.S. I have a draft PDF document describing my idea in greater detail if I have missed out anything: http://www.scribd.com/doc/28414174/Anirudh-Anirudhsanjeev-org-March-11-2010 -- Senior Undergraduate Student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur http://anirudhsanjeev.org Start something! http://consumelesscreatemore.com
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