On Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:01:10 +0200 "Meho R." <mehor at gmx.com> wrote:
>> > I'm not sure about which apps you're talking, but I personally > can't remember using a FOSS app in last couple of years which > doesn't come with at least some basic infos about its usage or > a man page. Saying that most of OSS lack documentation > completely is quite an exaggeration. > > ___ > Lets consider some cases: Inkscape has a big thick manual that you can access on line for free or you can buy in paper form for money. The irony is that the printed version doesn't have any color pages in it. You can download the illos in color and print them out yourself but that is an unhandy result. (I did it anyhow.) There is also a small B/W book, the contents of which are taken direcly from various wiki pages etc. The whole book is GPLed. Copying is encouraged. Context, a TeX variant, has many manuals, too many in fact, which can be downloaded, but the main manual is very obsolete. The godfather of Context, Hans Hagen, likes to write new books but appparently doesn't like to update old ones. The rest of TeX has lots of pdf papers you can download and also several books that have been written. The problem is that if it is in print it is very old. This works for a dinosaur like me but the latest and greatest changes (e.g., how to use OTF fonts) are in individual papers, which themselves don't always keep up. Gimp had a huge manual that you could download or buy in paper form. Today's manual is online, and in html format. It is pretty much kept up to date. It is not downloadable unless you want to deal with converting a manual in html format. Also the content is in individual chunks of html, easy to access online but tedious to download in its entirety. There are several excellent books available but they are expensive and aren't updated frequently enough. Open COBOL has an excellent manual that you can download and print out. I don't refer to it often because I wrote my first COBOL program in 1968. So what model should Scribus follow? In the case of Inkscape the manual author and the publisher of same is one person. He has a perfect right to sell his work product. We don't have a parallel author of Scribus documentation. No single person authors and owns it. The latest useful commmercial book is both obsolete (version 1.3.5) and not comprehensive compared to the even more obsolete "The Scribus Manual". I would suggest that the present online Scribus manual be put in pdf form and made available for download. Or else it could be GPLed and whoever wanted to convert it and get it printed could do so. The answer is there are no perfect answers. But most successful Open Source products have documentation both online and purchasable in book form. Scribus needs a complete and reasonably up to date comprehensive manual. And I don't know how to arrive at that. John Culleton
