Special:Badtitle/NS102:Scribus Times and Gazette/Some Observations on Scribus Documentation

Having been "involved" with Scribus for some time now, I thought it might be useful to put down some personal observations on the development of Scribus documentation. If you have managed to see my presentation that I made at LGM 2009, then you will fully understand how the spark of life was transmitted from Franz Schmid to Peter Linnell which led to the original documentation.

Understandably, there was great concern about keeping the documentation accurate, helpful, and in a professional vein so that Scribus could find its rightful place in the armamentarium of those who seek high-quality PDFs capable of satisfying the needs of commercial printing operations. Scribus clearly steps on toes, those of the proprietary software projects responsible for end-user layout, and those that are used by printing operations to manage the physical printing of that layout.

In the process, a community developed around Scribus, a community that appreciated and valued this approach and wanted to be a part of advancing and promoting the use of Scribus. Eventually, it was decided to create a wiki space, so that if nothing else there might be a venting of this energy, and I readily became part of trying to make the wiki something that filled in gaps, that answered the all too common questions we see on the mailing list from self-labelled "newbies" seeking answers to the unfamiliar problems they encountered. We knew that if they didn't care, they wouldn't bother to ask questions.

A turning point came about when these ad hoc efforts finally led to fleshing out and creating an Official Manual, which I think once and for all established the value of a collection of interested nonprogrammers for a project such as this.

At this point, we now reach another milestone, in which we expect to see a melding of the official and unofficial efforts, with the main goal of making a comprehensive documentation, not just for using Scribus, but also containing information about design, layout, and the commercial printing process (and not excluding PDFs created for the web).