[linux-audio-user] [OT] graphics for tutorials, was: [OT] any gimp maestros here ?

[R Parker]

--- Dave Phillips <dlphilp at bright.net> wrote:

> Greetings:
> 
>   First of all, thank you to everyone who responded.
> I really only 
> expected a few replies, but it seems that many of
> you here are 
> multi-talented, and I thank you all for your
> messages and offers of 
> assistance. I received so many replies that I
> thought it might be better 
> to respond to the list (rather than individually),
> and I want to expand 
> the topic anyway.
> 
>   After some consideration I've decided to bring the
> original topic to 
> the list. I'm preparing some documentation for a
> project, and I need to 
> make some "instructive" screenshots, what Steve D
> tells me are called 
> callouts. Brett McCoy suggested I use layers in the
> GIMP, which seems 
> pretty do-able to me, but someone else suggested
> that I might be better 
> off using something like xfig. I want to do a simple
> thing (well, to me 
> it's simple, but that's because I don't know how to
> do it), I want to 
> place a screenshot against a larger white
> background, which would server 
> as an area for descriptive text. Arrows would point
> from the text to the 
> item described, and ideally those arrows would be
> placed at any needed 
> angle. Considering how often I see this type of
> picture I'd assumed it 
> would be simple in the GIMP: would I in fact be
> better accomodated by 
> some other graphics app ?
> 
>   The topic has got a bit bigger in my mind now, so
> I thought I'd ask 
> this question on the open list: Do users have a
> preference for 
> documentation format ? I admit that while I like
> HTML it does look 
> rather clunky next to a polished PDF file. Trouble
> is, I don't know how 
> to format for PDF. So, what format would you prefer
> ?

I do everything with docbook-xml and am able to
generate .txt, html, pdf, etc from the xml file. It's 
a solid strategy but I don't know how you should go
about doing something like that.

It's a no brainer to create templates for things like
QuikToots. The templates define the formating tags,
custom icons for admonitions, etc. With a CVS server
it would be a breeze to manage document versioning. I
imagine the distributions have gotten friendlier about
building the translation tools and enviroment but
don't know if that's true. A cron job fires
periodically and updates the documents.

The worst thing that can happen to a writer is they
spend time administrating publishing environments when
they should be writing. Maybe someone could setup a
CVS server and the publishing tools and then you could
pull the updates to your server.

If the above becomes feasible, I'd be happy to markup
my Loudness document with all the appropriate tags and
then strip it down to something that can be used as a
template of sorts for QuikToots.

ron

>   I've noted this thread as OT, hopefully no-one
> will be bored to tears 
> by it... :)
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> dp
> 
> 
> 



		
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