Proposal: Tuxtorial - an ehanced documentation creation and hosting system

[Anirudh Sanjeev]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for your response!

Let me clarify the points from my email.
1. I was originally intending to keep the server-side portions - the part
that hosts the tutorials for the world to see closed in the initial portion
of time.

The rationale for this was to prevent fragmentation in the intial state.
I'm concerned about having "fedora help" and "ubuntu help" as two separate
things when the same steps might work for both. Of course, my worldview is
extremely naive and has often been very wrong, and you are welcome to
correct me on this.

The rest of the code will be released under an MIT/X11 license, and I
expect to have it available for public testing within a few weeks, after my
university term and workload ends.

I have seen yelp and feel that Tuxtorial will _complement_ rather than
replace or enhance yelp.

For example, here's a section I found from yelp (how to resize an image):
[QUOTE]
The GIMP Image Editor supports several methods of resizing photos. We will
concentrate on the simplest method.
1. Open the photo you want to resize in the GIMP Image Editor
2. Press Image ▸ Scale Image
3. Adjust the Width or Height as appropriate. The image will be kept to scale.
4. If you want to adjust the width and height independently, press the link
   button which connects the Width and Height boxes, so that it looks like a
   broken link.
5. Under Quality, change the Interpolation to Cubic (Best). This will give you
   the best quality resized image
8. Press Scale to resize the photo
9. Press File ▸ Save As and choose a new filename for the photo
10.Press Save to save the resized photo
[/QUOTE]

Now while this is appropriate, I am curious to know how good this method
would perform when the task is slightly more complex, say, retouching an
image.

In my current scenario, a person who understands image editing, but does
not understand the formal procedure of contributing documentation, or does
not have the time to learn it, can just do what he normally does and
annotate the images, and the rest of the world can share from that
knowledge.

I am not aiming to replace Desktop Help. I partially was inspired by
howtoforge.org, which has articles like this:
http://howtoforge.org/tweaking-hidden-settings-with-ubuntu-tweak-on-ubuntu-9.10

While the articles are long and large, it does give the user an amount of
confidence in saying "hey, my application is looking the way his
application is looking, I must be on the right track."

Thanks,
Anirudh

I apologize for my grammar. I do not have time to proofread this email
right now as I have to leave somewhere.
-- 
Senior Undergraduate Student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
http://anirudhsanjeev.org

Start something! http://consumelesscreatemore.com
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