the work on the new documentation

Hello all,

Some of you might remember that I started working on the new
documentation months ago. The documentation is not complete, but a lot
of work has been done. It's probably more complete now than the current
old documentation.

The new documentation can be found here –
http://www.abisource.com/viewvc/abiword-docs/trunk/Manual-NG/en/ – and
you can open it with the command "yelp <full path to abiword.xml>". It's
only readable by Yelp for now, but it shouldn't be difficult to convert
it to HTML or PDF probably for those users who don't use Abiword on
Unix.

There is a problem though. I'm getting tired of doing this work, I don't
want and/or can't spend any more time on it, except for yesterday I
haven't committed anything to SVN for months. A demotivator is that for
serious work when it comes to word processing I use OpenOffice and not
Abiword, so I'm not really passionate about Abiword. The major
demotivator is that I'm practically the only one who has been able to
contribute large amounts of work to the documentation, I have been
assisted by Marc Maurer from the beginning and later John Richards, but
they have had very little time to work on the documentation so far.

So I'm going to quit, but I hope something can be done to make the new
documentation a success, it would be a shame if the current work would
go to waste. Maybe the next release could include the new documentation,
even if it isn't complete? If that release would also be accompanied by
a call for improving the documentation (make it obvious, maybe put some
text on the download page?), new contributors might be attracted who
could continue the work on the documentation.

Finally, because I'm going to quit I request that my SVN account will be
removed.

Greetings,
Alexander van Loon
Received on Mon Sep 8 09:21:50 2008