I am a very new GIMP user. I am also not a very knowledgeable graphics person.
So I located your User Manual in hopes that it might help me learn more about
your product for my personal web designing needs. I sponsor a couple of very
simple web sites for the theatre and general aviation groups I am a part of.
Since I am not a program developer, or a graphics artist, I am finding it very
difficult to follow your documentation and to understand it's content.
I am, however, a documentation specialist and have been for many years. I have
written many different types of user documentation, training materials and
administrative tools for government software applications. I hope this
feedback from a fellow tech writer might come in handy, and to help upgrade
your hard work on your materials and to better support your very powerful
product.
As a simple user, I am finding the writing in the documentation very high
level. Since I am not that technical, like a developer would be, the writing
level could come down "quite a bit" for those of us who really only want to
know how to use the products abilities, much like a "How-To" guide.
As a fellow writer I know how much work would be involved in re-writing such a
large document. But maybe these few suggestions for modifying/adding to it
might help users who need something written at a little lower level.
1) In every subsection (i.e., 5.1 Path Creating, 5.3 Transforming Paths, etc.),
add an actual step-by-step exercise that can be followed to actually create
what you are describing.
2) In the paragraph descriptions, try not to use high level buzz words, such as
in section 6. Brushes "pixmap". There is no real definition of it, or anything
that can find or understand.
3) Stay consistent throughout the document. As suggested in item #1, putting
step-by-steps would be helpful. You have some like in section 9 for creating a
brush. But other sections that could use these don't have any.
4) Be consistent with terminology. Such as using the word "options" and
"dialogs" for the pop-up windows used for all the tools. It becomes confusing.
Of course I have not yet read through the entire document, so some of these
ideas/suggestions might have been followed further into the manual. If not, I
hope they are helpful making a good product much better and more useful to a
wider audience.
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