installation guide

Karsten Wade kwade at redhat.com
Fri Aug 27 23:33:12 UTC 2004


Okay, I'm onboard for the All Hands on Deck for an Installation Guide
for FC3.  

We have until about 20 October to have a release candidate, and this is
possible to do if we make the pieces small enough and keep the editors
busy.

More below ...

On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 15:33, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> Cf. http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129911

Below are some specific points, and I expanded on those suggestions in a
patch to the Documentation Guide, as a new 7.3 Taking Screenshots.  I'll
reply back in a bit with the steps, after I build the DB and snarf them
from the HTML page. :)

For expediency, I'm prepared to just submit the patch to the Doc Guide,
rolling in some other dangling issues I can include.  Tammy would see
the CVS report and can address any mistakes and expand/modify.

> I'll volunteer for partitioning, as mentioned in the &BZ; entry above. I
> would like to suggest several guidelines for screenshots and any other
> graphics (I think the GDSG may use something similar to these, IIRC):
> 
> 1. PNG format. Is that too obvious?

And EPS.

> 2. No wider than 500 pixels. If your graphic is larger than that, use
> GIMP (Image -> Scale Image) or mogrify to scale the image to no wider
> than 500 pixels.

That seems reasonable.  Make the GUI as small as it can to convey just
what you need.

2.1 Use the default Metacity theme to give the guides a consistent look,
and also consistent with most user's experience and expectations.

2.2 If you need to crop the image, do that in the GIMP to show just what
you need.

> 3. Graphics should be included as <figure> I think.

http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/documentation-guide/s1-xml-tags-figure.html

That shows the format.  We kept the EPS first because of legacy jadetex
issues, no idea if it matters anymore and I'm not tempting fate to find
out. ;)

> Here's another one I just thought of; the GDSG mentions this as well:
> 
> 4. Graphics should not be included unless you absolutely *cannot* get
> along without it. There's no reason to include repetitive screenshots of
> parts of the interface that are easily explained in a sentence.
> (Example: anaconda runs several progress bars when it computes package
> dependencies, writes an install image to the drive, etc.... those don't
> need to be screenshotted. Wait, is that a real word?)

That seems reasonable.  It's nice to have one screenshot to show the
whole GUI, if that helps.  It's probably better to have too few
screenshots than too many.

For quality of information, I find <screen> blocks (as <example>s) with
nice, useful command line output to be better ... :)

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, Tech Writer
a lemon is just a melon in disguise
http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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