Basically, this Help is not a HOW-TO. It is a reference where users can find explanations about all command and options. It is related to the F1 context help.

Some how-to have been added, but you can find much better on the Web. You can find some good books also, and you will see that none describes all commands. Another advantage of our help is that we can have many colored images.

About terminology : GIMP uses a specific vocabulary like other graphic programs.
An adaptation period is necessary as for any technique.The Glossary can help you.

We are desperately looking for new doc writers... Writing an example for every command is a project.

Tamie Burch wrote:

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.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shape Yahoo! in your own image. Join our Network Research Panel today!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 09:16:27AM -0700, Tamie Burch wrote:

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. [...]
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.

Yes - I like this proposal. I think that would improve our manual a lot. I thought about amalgamate some tutorial chapters which first tell your the the facts and give you one or two tutorials afterwards. Check my thoughts I had in the past:

http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/gimp-docs/2007-February/000682.html

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.

What do you propose to use in this context. An example on how we can do it better would be nice :)

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.

We could do a bug report out of this. Are there other chapters lack of consistency or chapters missing the same content used in a few sections ...

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.

I created a bug report for this:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=467568

Feel free to comment.

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.

Prepare to find more glitches. There is currently no maintainer for English. Julien contributed a lot content for English even when no one maintained this translation. So, thanks to him this translation isn't gone aboard ;)

Greetings,