18 Nov
2011
18 Nov
'11
12:09 a.m.
On Thursday 17 November 2011 11:50:12 am Calvin Morrison wrote:
Do you want a new inexperienced user writing your help manual?
I'm not saying that. We want them to be able to contribute. They won't want to
write the whole manual anyway. It's just a matter of allowing them to help us
clarify from their newbie perspective.
--
Kristopher Gamrat
Ark Linux webmaster
http://www.arklinux.org/
On 17 November 2011 11:42, Kristopher John Gamrat
<chaotickjg(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Thursday 17
November 2011 11:25:23 am Calvin Morrison wrote:
LibreOffice Write, MS Word, etc. It just lets you do normal word
processing.
My Mistake, I meant to say "markdown". In which you do almost no specific
formatting, no sizes or colors. This is all done when you generate the
files the only markup you need for markdown is very basic. for example:
*this is bold*
_this is italic*
# This is my top header
## second header
### third
* here is a list iten
* here is another list iten
* here is the third and final item
<http://google.com> is a link to google.com
On 17 November 2011 11:10, Kristopher John Gamrat
<chaotickjg(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
> On Thursday 17 November 2011 10:25:58 am
Marvin L. Jones wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, Calvin Morrison wrote:
> > >But if we are suggesting that our users are incapable of editing
> > > markup of any kind, I seriously doubt their ability to use patch,
> > > diff, and git commands.
> >
> > You expect _users_ to be doing patch, diff, and git commands?
> > I don't think so.
>
> If the website view of the git repository allows people to download
files
> directly, they don't need to use git.
They can just submit it to us
> and we can upload it to git. It would just be easier for those who do
> know git.
>
> > Is it too late to put in a request to do documentation in WordStar?
> > Now, there's a markup language _I_ know! :-)
> > (I have it running here on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS...)
>
> I don't think we'll accept any requests for any markup languages. If
you
can
find something that'll do the job efficiently without making it any
harder than opening a standard word processor, then it's not too
late.
A standard word processor? you mean libreoffice. I've been double checking and I can't
find fodt support in Abiword,
msoffice, and I don't think Word Perfect does it either.
Another reason to use markup is because it is standardized. With a
regular
office application, users would spend a lot of
time selecting and
making sure font sizes, formatting, and other things are correct. With
markdown you don't do any of this.
How will it look right if it's not formatted correctly? Even with HTML
(which
is markup), you need to format with things like size, fonts, and colors. I think
saying "we are not going to use any markdown because we dont
want our contributors to have to learn anything, even remotely simple"
is a
bad
philosophy. I understand if they were going to be
using LaTex (quite
complicated) or writing in C++, but markdown is designed exactly for
these
sort of things.
People already need to learn TDE, maybe even the computer. Those of us
who grew up with computers and/or using Linux for awhile won't find that
hard, but new inexperienced TDE users who want to contribute as a way of
saying thanks are going to spend enough time getting adjusted. They might
only learn
one or two apps really well and be trying to learn everything else they
need.
We do want them to learn, we don't want to put them into overload.