[Scribus] Manual draft for scribus 1.4 on the Wiki

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi Greg,

> There probably needs to be a warning or caution on the Wiki itself about 
> respecting the copyright of the official Scribus docs site.

There is already a warning on authorisation, but it could be more clear.

> Personally, 
> I think what could be useful would be to take a different approach than 
> the official documentation, which is much like a text, and organized in 
> a linear fashion.  Perhaps looking at scribus-list one can sift through 
> to find the real-world questions that come up before someone even starts 
> up Scribus.

This is already happening. Many articles in the FAQ are derived from 
postings and refined afterwards.

> For example, the approach could be more geared to someone who has a 
> concept -- an ad, a newsletter, a magazine, or even something simpler 
> than these.  Either you're someone who has experience in doing this in 
> some other way, or you're someone who needs help understanding how to 
> start the layout conceptually.
> 
> The experienced person mainly needs help understanding what we might 
> call the "Scribus way" - what frames there are, what they can contain, 
> altering/moving/switching, plus help on repetitive tasks. They will 
> quickly want to understand how to generate PDFs that are printer-ready.
> The inexperienced person needs some help just understanding why to use 
> Scribus rather than just adding images to a wordprocessing document.  
> Probably needs help just knowing what to look for. We know from the list 
> that understanding templates is a difficult concept for many. Font 
> problems have been big and of many different kinds. The Story Editor is 
> a foreign concept to many.

I absolutely agree with you. Maybe you can have a look at the current 
outline. It is intended to help DTP newbies as well as advanced users. I 
still think that it is possible to help both of them in one document. It 
might make sense, however, to "fork" the manual one day into a document 
for starters and a manual for QXP or ID "converts".

What I'm worried about is to get printed documentation available. We 
already have a useful book in German for scribus 1.2, but it doesn't 
cover enough of scribus' features. Many people (including me) prefer a 
dead tree version of the documentation. If we could enable the 
production of books on scribus through the Wiki, that would be great.

Cheers,

Christoph