[scribus] Finding Stuff in the Wiki and Manual

[Christoph Schäfer]

Am Freitag, 17. Juli 2009 04:10:51 schrieb John Jason Jordan:
> On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:23:49 -0600
>
> "D. R. Evans" <doc.evans at gmail.com> dijo:
> > I'm sure this is answered somewhere in the manual, but I can't find it
> > (actually, that's my biggest complaint about the manual... I just cannot
> > find stuff in it; maybe I'm just too used to the TeXbook's index).
>
> I don't have the manual, but I have spent hours trying to find stuff in
> the Wiki and other documentation, frequently without luck. I have a
> theory that might explain my lack of skill at finding things.
>
> I have never used TeX, but I have used a number of other layout apps -
> PageMaker, QuarkXpress, Ventura, InDesign - and I think my problem is
> terminology. For example, I search for how to do a tab and can't find
> it. How was I to know that Scribus calls it a tabulator? 

Perhaps because those have been synonyms since the age of typewriters, i.e. 
more than hundred years?

> I could go on 
> and on, but I think y'all see my point. Even people new to the whole
> idea of DTP don't know the Scribus terms for things. Yet the
> documentation typically contains only the Scribus term.

One reasonable approach is to try to read the user interface, imho. This 
should be a good starting point. Another issue has more to do with the way 
the wiki software works. You have two choices to search for an item: "Go" 
and "Search". It's recommended to use "search" if you're unsure whether a 
title actually contains the search term. It may also be useful to search for 
terms in both US and UK spellling (e.g. "color" and "colour").
>
> I am wondering if we could somehow create a table of terminology for
> the various apps with the Scribus equivalents. If Scribus and all the
> other common apps call it the same thing (eg., "paragraph style"), this
> would not need to be included. But if any of the other apps uses a
> different term, this should be listed.
>
> This could become a mini-project within the documentation side of
> Scribus. Ultimately the results could be incorporated into the Wiki and
> the index for the manual.

Guess what? A table with Scribus, XPress and InDesign terms is part of the 
manual :) Moreover, since I created the table, I noted that the Scribus 
terminology is quite similar to XPress, although in some cases it's closer to 
InDesign. There are only a few instances of terms that are completely 
different.

Christoph