[Scribus] Manual - interesting feedback

[Gregory Pittman]

John Beardmore wrote:
> William F. Maddock wrote:
>
>   
>> The "Design Concept" part might wind up being the most extensive,
>>     
>  >but would only need to be done one time, as it is going into some
>  >detail explaining the "why" of the particular construction of
>  >scribus, so that as things move forward it makes it easier for
>  >users to find and learn the use of new features (because the
>  >developers have sort of let the user into their heads to know what
>  >they are thinking). An added bonus: I'm not sure that there are
>  >currently any manuals that actually try to do that yet. It could
>  >be a scribus first. :-)
>
> I'll second the notion that this is important.  Getting your head around 
> the model the designers of software are using from 'how to' 
> instructions, really isn't the beat way round.
>   
I'm not quite if this is what John and William had in mind, but there 
might be the interesting recursive possibility of creating some wiki 
pages that, like the tutorial, show the process of creating the manual. 
Not just the use of Scribus's tools for making it, but also the 
considerations that went into why a particular layout was chosen (such 
as the comments Andreas made), things about content, images, which PDF 
version, various PDF export settings. These are things which may not be 
easy or desirable to include in the manual itself, if nothing else just 
to keep the project from getting excessively large.

So it ends up not just being how to make the manual, but how to make a 
manual that is attractive, using a sensible workflow involving 
collaboration, with an output suitable to printers, and in the end 
achieves the desired result. We also need something designed to be updated.

Greg