From: Alan Horkan (horkana@maths.tcd.ie)
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 06:24:37 EDT
On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Bill K wrote:
> Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 21:27:16 +0000
> From: Bill K <titanic2394@hotmail.com>
> To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Cc: duchess34230@yahoo.com, tworth@tampabay.rr.com
>
> Bill Kaser, Courtney Linn, and I have spent the last 16 weeks in an Advanced
> Technical Writing course at the University of South Florida. One of our
> class projects was to create a user-centered, task-oriented tutorial for
> AbiWord. We are one of three groups assigned to submit such a tutorial.
>
> Our cross-platform tutorial is valuable for those users who are not using
> proprietary software such as Microsoft Word. Not only does this tutorial
> teach users the features and functions of the program, but it also teaches
> them how to use these features and functions to create common documents.
>
> We replicated the AbiWord icons, menus, dialogs, and interface in order to
> assist the user to become familiar with the program. You'll notice we
> incorporated the AbiSource color scheme so that the tutorial appears to be a
> part of the AbiSource module. In order to make this tutorial more
> user-friendly, we provided some visual cues. For consistency, readability,
> coherence, and compatability we used Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS also
> allows for other developers to make design changes easily. To demonstrate
> the flexibility of CSS, we are supplying two additional links that contain
> the same tutorial using alternate style sheets.
>
> Please consider the following tutorial for use as the official AbiWord
> tutorial: http://helios.acomp.usf.edu/~tworth/tutorial/index.html
>
> Thank you for your consideration.
>
> Sincerely,
>
>
> Bill Kaser
> Courtney Linn
> Tina Worth
>
> Alternate versions:
> http://helios.acomp.usf.edu/~wkaser/current/ABIWord/title.html
>
> http://helios.acomp.usf.edu/~clinn/ABIWord/firstpg.html
Resending because I very nearly deleted the message as spam (no Subject)
and I suspect others on the list might also have overlooked it.
It is under the Gnu Free Documentation License.
It would be nice to get this into CVS and try and maintain it centrally
with other documentation and have it on the website too.
The Tutorial looks pretty good, I will have to read it in further.
I notice on the first page it says select image to begin, which looks
terrible if you have images turned off. I would recommend against
instructing the user to click the image and just have text saying Begin
Abiword Tutorial linked instead.
<a href="welcome.html">Begin Abiword Tutorial<img src="Begin Abiword
Tutorial"></a>
Netscape 4.x has badly broken stylesheet support, if you could have some
browser detection and turn off stylesheets (or fall back to a different
stylesheet) for crappy old browsers it would be much better. Although I
am not using Mozilla today Mozilla (and I think Opera too) allows you to
pick from the avialable stylesheets if the authors specify multiple
stylesheets.
Using the Link REL tags to specify Next and Previous is good for
accessibility (again Mozilla and i think Opera have special support for
this standard).
Most of the Gnome and KDE documentation is done in XML Docbook and other
formats generated from that, which perhaps might be of interest in any
future projects.
You must have used Abiword extensively to write this tutorial, if you
found any bugs that you can still replicate against the latests versions
(stable 1.0.x or unstable 1.1.x) it would be good to hear them.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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