[is there a better list for this? which?]
There's a lot of bad tutorials out there. Some of them
are on the gimp.org site, some are on gumpusers.com, etc...
and I said in Poland we needed some hot tutorial love...
Some properties of a good tutorial, I claim, are
(1) it tells you at the start
1a. what you will learn
1b. what you must already know in order to use the tutorial
1c. roughly how long it will take you
(2) at each step it shows
2a. a screenshot of the image
2b. any necessary dialogue boxes with settings you must enter
2c. the layers dialogue, or anything else that will help the
user know they did the earlier steps correctly
2d. guidance for what to do if you went wrong.
(3) everything you must do is explicitly mentioned, including
"select none", "create new layer", "select a layer again
after saving the selection to a channel", "choose the brush tool".
(4) any dialogues, screenshots, messages are given in the same language
as the tutorial (so on translation, new screenshots may be needed),
and language of the tutorial has been checked for obvious errors...
(5) should be under the GNU Free Documentation License.
I don't want to step on anyone's toes here... but maybe we can
go through the tutorials on the gimp site, and make new ones,
fix bugs and/or improve existing ones?
I notice also, e.g. "GIMPLITE QUICKIES [1]" says, at the top,
Text and images Copyright (C) 2004 Carol Spears and may not
be used without permission of the author.
I wonder if Carol would be amenable to re-releasing these
tutorials under a GNU-compatible license so we can edit them?
Or give permission for them to be edited -- since it's too much
work for one person to do, and in any case they'd certainly
benefit from a second person's eyes...
I'm prepared (GULP) to work on keeping a list of tutorials and
their status if some other people can help out e.g. by testing
the tutorials (I can do some of that too, and I don't mind
working on the English of some of them, too; I can't translate
them myself, though).
How about a "Made for GIMP 2.6" icon to go on tutorials that
have been checked? (or "Made for 2.8")
I hope one result would be that it would be easier to check the
tutorials again next time round...
Liam [Ankh]
--
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
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