Talk:Documentation/Manual

From MyPaint

[edit] V-key colour selector

Can we document the newest version please? We should probably help people grok what the cardinal and diagonal bars mean, and possibly explain about the "nearby" colours. Labelled diagram perhaps... --Achadwick 17:02, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Split technical blurb from (first time user) stuff

There's a lot of techie blurb like

This shortcut will substract 0.3 to the property "radius_logarithmic" of the brush (its range is -2.0 to 5.0). The initial value depends of the brush

on the page, which is fine for bods like me but probably horribly intimidating to new users with a more arty / less techie background. If the technical stuff needs to live here, let's at least put it in a sidebar or something and just explain the basics of the feature :-) --Achadwick 17:05, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Normal users will not want to bother with all the brush settings, only maybe a subset. Trying to explain them all here once more (and trying to be more detailed than the tooltip) is just a waste of effort, I think.

I was toying with the thought of building up a "brush crossreference" (generated html) that would list all brushes using a certain setting, have to tooltip there again, and a grep result of the relevant sourcecode... The brush settings are really somewhere at the border between user and developer, and I wish this were not seen so much as a defect... I don't think they can ever all be explained intuitively to "non-coder" end users without removing some of mypaint's best brush features. --maxy 18:21, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Split out less-used features into sub-pages?

It might be a good idea to carve out the features 90% of people don't use so often and detail them up more fully in sub-pages focussed on just that topic. The list of all the brush settings, for example.

Ideally I'd want the main page to be a quick overview or description of the most important and frequently-used features, intended to give a friendly and not too technically scary overview of the program for new users. If there's more to say about a feature, linking to a topic sub-page would be an option. --Achadwick 17:12, 19 October 2010 (UTC)