[Bf-docboard] Manual scope

[Wim Teuling]

A reference manual is a great idea: every other manual I read or worked with is exactly that: a place to quickly find information how to use a particular tool. No fluff, and focused. Once users know the terminology and basic usage principles, this should enable them to look for tutorials.

 A reference manual, however, requires an solid and robust structure, and should offer a good search function. This is currently not the case with Blender's manual, or at least only partly true, unfortunately.

A basic search for "selection", or "selection methods" results in a useless search result. Trying to find "selection" as a category in the current manual structure yields nothing! I would expect that to be part of "Basics" under "Getting Started".

 

     On Saturday, January 24, 2015 5:20 AM, Greg Zaal <gregzzmail at gmail.com> wrote:
   
 

 I'd agree - a reference manual seems like a much more easily reached target. I myself would prefer to have a good reference available than a guided manual.

It would definitely make maintenance simpler, and would be easier to write since it requires less teaching and language skills than a guided manual.

If people still wish to write tutorials and in-depth examples, these can be done elsewhere (personal wiki pages, forums, blogs, etc) and linked to from the manual. This is already done occasionally, for example the array modifier (http://blender.org/manual/modifiers/generate/array.html#tutorials) links to some external resources.

On 24 January 2015 at 08:56, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:

It was suggested by @el_diablo that we might consider restricting the
manual to being a reference manual.

see:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?360263-Blender-User-Manual-Official-Call-for-Help!&p=2803818&viewfull=1#post2803818

This doesn't mean we have to make this simply lists of button
descriptions, we should still make this text for users and give some
guidance (usage info and tips).

Examples of pages I'd consider reasonable for a 'reference manual'

- https://www.blender.org/manual/modeling/meshes/editing/subdividing/knife_subdivide.html
- https://www.blender.org/manual/modifiers/generate/solidify.html
- https://www.blender.org/manual/getting_started/basics/interface/buttons_and_controls.html

This means we wouldn't attempt anything like tutorials or howto's.

The main reasons I suggest this is...

- So far we only have a small group of active writers.
- This is what the manual is for the mostpart anyway.
- The few tutorials from the wiki were OK (at best),
... Youtube, blender.stackexchange & dedicated tutorial sites are far
better suited to helping users with spesific interests.
- This is something developers can keep up tp date when functionality
is changed, without giving us pages of text to maintain.

--
- Campbell
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