Thank you for your elaborate answer. I do have some follow-up questions though. On 19 Aug 2003, at 14:01, Daniel Egger wrote: > Am Die, 2003-08-19 um 12.19 schrieb Branko Collin: > [current manual] > > Why are you not too happy about the content and the structure? > > It is too anarchic in its sructural layout and Mel didn't like the > language at all. What we imagined was more like a modern manual (in > both content and layout) leveraging all possibilities of modern tools > without the fear to break anything existant (ie. the helpbrowser). Assume for a second that I know nothing about 'modern manuals'. What is it about them that you like. What did Mel not like about the language of the old manual? Also, when I came to the GIMP, there was no manual. There was a book that called itself that, but it wasn't shipped with any of the GIMP distros that I knew, and a web version was actually rather hard to find. So, when you are talking about the GUM, are you talking about that obscure book, or about the help files, or both? Are you trying to make a manual and help files in one? > > You also talked about granularity. Apparently, part of your idea of > > a GIMP documentation style is that help pages should be of similar > > size. Could you elaborate about that? Is that what you mean with > > granularity? > > Granularity means that an author is not limited to squeeze all > information about a certain topic into exactly the given structure, > like a section; we had great troubles and some not so nice workarounds > when being faced with large topics in the old version. This means that > if something deserves a chapter it'll get a chapter without us having > to worry about how this is transformed into a HTML file with a fixed > name (because it's hardcoded into the GIMP) and referenced later on. > This would be grnaularity on the source side. > > Granularity on the output means exactly what you are referring to that > the help chunks are all of the correct size. When the user requests > help on blur the displayed information should resemble exactly that > and not show all plugins with blur somewhere at the beginning. Ah, OK, so when you say size, you don't mean physical size? But that the document is on-topic for the user? > We > already agreed to use HTML with anchors though, so this is something > we probably cannot have easily since it's impossible to control the > output granularity on case-by-case basis. Probably not. But I imagine that if I wanted to see a page about one of the blur filters, you would be able to provide me with a page about that help filter. -- branko collin collin@xxxxxxxxx
