26 Nov
2004
26 Nov
'04
10:43 a.m.
--- Dave Phillips <dlphilp(a)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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