Write and bundle documentation

[Maia Everett]

Pinta should have documentation bundled with the application, detailing its various features, tools, and hotkeys.

I might take a shot at writing documentation in the Docbook format used by GNOME, which can then be either shipped as is or compiled to HTML.

[grofaty (grofaty)]

Just wondering is there some work done in this field? I like how documentation is done in Notepad++ (Windows open-source text editor) - from Help menu there is started local HTML file. URL of web page is in the following logic file://path_to_the_program_install_dir/documentation.html - this kind of solution is probably simple enough for multiplatform and also to have the same documentation on official project web page. I am willing to write or make a revision of documentation. But we need some simple way to exchange documentation contributions.

[Roland (Rolandixor) Taylor (rolandixor)]

Jonathan Morlock is in charge of this, and I'm pitching in.

[Alan Horkan (horkana)]

is there a copy of the work in progress available somewhere?

[Cameron White (cameronwhite91)]

Not that I'm aware of ...

We've been talking about doing this for a while but never really got around to it, so I'll be ambitious and target this for 1.7 :)

There are a bunch of things on the technical side of things to figure out, like what format to use (Mallard, Docbook, Sphinx, etc), how to handle translations, and how it should be packaged with Pinta / made available.

[grofaty (grofaty)]

Documentation can be a huge project by itself, so one of the most imporant thing in my humble opinion is collaboration method and also a documentation maintainer to coordinate what gets in and what not. One of the ways is to create similar tutorials like Terry did in youtube.com videos, see top articles: http://pinta-project.com/howto/pinta-on-web

[Cameron White (cameronwhite91)]

I've started some work on this (https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta/commit/4f3a3d86)

[Cameron White (cameronwhite91)]

There is now a great user guide that we can provide on the website (https://github.com/PintaProject/user-guide), so for 1.7 we should remove the yelp-based documentation (which is extremely incomplete) and point to the new user guide

[Cameron White (cameronwhite91)]

The new user guide on the website is now linked to from the Help menu.
https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta/commit/7027dd0568ed48204b7575177f046a146429839d
https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta/commit/255e0aecd9768379b12417a8019c6b89745af804