[Bf-docboard] A blender FAQ

[Alastair Mason]

Greetings

I took the questions from
http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismdepts/library/linuxguides/blender/,
but it has no maintainer and the link site seems to be down so I
rewrote all the questions, but was still clarifing them.

The challenge, as I see it is that there are two types of FAQ's. The
basic one, that blender has but needs a bit of up dating. This is
great for people looking into blender for the first time. New users or
people who want to join and need quick basic answers. The wiki's
search engine is tragicly not up to scrach type a simple quiery like
Render and it gives you every occurance (153) of them in every
language and on every sub form (BlenderDev). And no were in the first
20 resaults (reggardless of langage) does it tell you how to do a
basic render.

The second tpye of FAQ would be designed with an ever expanding user
group in mind. Pro's and enthusiast's genrally know their way around
blender or a 3D enviroment program so could find basics like
rendering. A new user especially one from the bussiness sector does
not have the time to search through pages of documentation or 153
answers to find a basic task they need to do. If we want the blender
base to grow we need to look at ways every one from a new comer to a
more advance user can quickly find the answer too a quesion, especial
if they working to a scedual. Goto elysiun genral any time and see how
many basic questions are being asked repetively, often with statments
like "sorry if this has been asked a thosand times". Or look for
people that request things such as"need to know the answer today".
Many do ask questions outside the realm of saine documentation many
ask basics.

Tragicly most people are lasy and would rather not learn a program
with out full documentation. And would hesitate to bring it into the
work enviroment if some of the users aren't computer fundies and need
basic refrences or only use it from time to time and forget even
basics (my proplem when first start, i think i wore a thin patch into
the gus tutorial reading it so many times).

This session could be looked at rather than an FAQ but as a index of
sorts. Links rather back to documentation, than composes of all the
answers. Only short answers would be add to sections that were
situationaly less clear or spread over a large area of documentation
or not covered in the documentation.

It is not an attemp at rewriting the documentaion.

Hopefully I am a bit more clear now
al