On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Angus Leeming wrote: > Example of modifier commands in action: > > Template XFig [good stuff snipped] > TemplateEnd > > Needless to say, I'd like suggestions on how to improve any of this...
I appreciate what you are trying to do, and I love the fact that my baby is growing up to become mature, but looking at the syntax you wrote, I fear the complexity is crossing the line where the users will not be able to handle it anymore without more help. Today, the biggest problem with the external inset is that people do not understand what it is, what it can do, and even less can make their own templates. It is too advanced, there is no existing similar concept elsewhere, and when seeing it, what does external material mean anyway? How do I know that this is the main issue? I know because we only have a couple of submitted external templates, from you and Dekel, both developers. Is that because it is not useful? I refuse to think so. Is it because we need support for rotation and scaling? While really nice stuff, this seems unlikely to me as well. I believe it is lack of documentation and marketing. So before adding new features, it would seem like a good place to step in on those areas first. The original division of work was that Jose should write some examples, but of course he never managed to find the time, and who am I to point fingers? Now, you obviously understand this business, so you would be a natural candidate to work on improving the documentation, hint, hint. Maybe a short tutorial that describes the process of making a simple template would be a boost. Also, extend the tutorial or the user guide to include a couple of examples -- those documents are read first by users, while the advanced extended is probably only glimpsed by the truly interested. But, if that is not sexy enough for you to work on, then can I at least ask you to write the documentation for the above new stuff first, so that we at least make sure that the proper documentation exists for this. This will help prevent that the external material insets turns into something only for the truly, truly enlightened to understand? Best regards, Asger
