[Scribus] Manual

[Craig Bradney]

> excuses as to why there aren't any. Those replies are not helpful. If a
> project as large and complicated as OpenOffice.org can have a printable
> manual (which it does:
> http://billsey-christian.net/tmp/ShotsOfOOoManual.JPG ; apparently done
> largely by one person), certainly scribus can also.

This has been answered in full in other ways by others, but I'll point you to 
just one single reason why this might not be the right one to use when 
arguing for work towards a PDF manual.

Time.

Now, I will respectfully exclude our most delightful and hard working  
contributor community from this analysis, just to tell a little about the 
people actually writing most of the code.

There are 9 regular to semi-regular developers working on Scribus. As far as I 
know, most of us are employed elsewhere for a good portion of every Monday - 
Friday. 2 of us are at some stage of building houses. 3 of us have kids. 5 of 
us are married. 

None (0) of us *currently* receives money to aid us spend more time 
*developing* Scribus as far as I am aware. (I exclude the very generous help 
we have had for travelling to LGM1/2,/Other events, and our web hosting, 
excuse me if I have forgotten anthing else...)

So, in the few hours we have each day when we are not doing work, sleep, 
eating, being with the family, raising kids, etc, we choose to write some 
code to make Scribus exist. Don't take this as a sob story or a request for 
money, or in any way an attempt to lift us up in glory, but simply a reason 
why when there's time to code, there's time to code, and as Scribus is 
changing so much, documentation we write will catch up later.

In fact, at least one commercial book deal has been delayed and delayed, and 
probably cancelled, due to the fact that we simply see no benefit in *us* 
writing 400 pages for a program that will look and act very differently in 
3-6-12 months time. Don't forget the fact that then we would have to split 
the few hours per day we do have between coding, testing, fixing, site 
management etc, and writing. 

Peter does a fantastic job of chasing the code with words in our internal 
documentation when he has time, and various others follow up with the 
magnificient effort of translation, but that doesnt lend itself yet to a full 
blown PDF manual. The excellent work of the documentation contributors goes 
into making the wiki better and better.

If you or anyone else wishes to convert parts (after checking on 
licencing/with the authors) of wiki documents, we would be more than happy to 
host this on our websites as the start of a PDF manual. Remember - it doesn't 
necessarily take a lot of time to contribute, but you have to have the time 
to do the work, and keep it relevant. I would certainly encourage people to 
come forward to help out in this process...

Craig