[Bf-docboard] And speaking about a new manual...

[Noel Stoutenburg]

Friends,

1). I use a commercial software product to notate music, and one of the 
features of this product is a "visual index". This visual index is a 
couple of pages of faux sheet music with the elements of music that make 
up a high proportion of the elements of music notation that most 
musicians would use, and the names used for those elements in the 
software. It is extraordinarily useful, especially for novice users of 
the software: they can consult the visual index, and find out the name 
of an element that is causing issues, saving time, by allowing them to 
ask questions in names that others will understand. I submit that a 
comparable visual index should be included in Blender. a screen shot, 
perhaps of a quad view screen, that would provide the names of blender 
elements (vertex, line, plane, object, wireframe mode, edge loop, loop 
cut, &c, so that a novice can consult this index and ask a question that 
all of us can understand at once. It is very helpful, not only in 
manuals, but in forums, to ask the question using the right words, and 
this is a way to help new users find the right words.

2) A "How do I...?" section, covering the most frequent tasks a Blender 
modeler would want to know. Examples of questions: How do I add ...? 
Separate answers for a single vertex, a mesh primitive, a loop cut, a 
lamp, a camera, &c. How do I group two objects together? How do I 
ungroup two objects?

This should be fairly easy to compile: create a script to crawl through 
the Blender Artist forums, and note every thread starting posts which 
starts with the phrase "how do I".

ns