Re: Possible answer to the screenshots thing. (fwd)

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

> At the bottom of each help doc, something saying:
> 
> Screenshots taken with: (app)
> Window manager: (window manager)
> GTK theme: (theme name, any notes, like if you changed the font)
> OS: (OS it came from)
> 
> Obviously, this isn't a licence for us all to come up with fancy 
> "look, mine's cutest!" (cos naturally I'd win :)) Just a way to
> come up with a consistent way of explaining things that lets people
> use the one they're most familiar with. 

This sounds like it favors making things easy for the documentation
authors at the expense of making things complicated for the documentation
readers.  Not only does the reader have to deal with the difference of
appearance of the screenshots, they also have all this additional
information given to them which will surely baffle many of them(I expect
my Mom doesn't know what a GTK theme is, nor does she want to hear about
it while she is trying to learn how to use the use the modem).

I don't think we should worry about how to get screenshots which look
right.  Somebody can either 1) use the default wm/theme we choose, 2)
create a dummy account they just use for screenshots and run on a separate
X session, or 3) create the screenshots with the wrong wm/theme and ask a
nice GDP volunteer to produce similar screenshots with the appropriate
wm/theme.  The GDP has a policy to convert non-DocBook documents.  We
should also convert non-GDP-standard screenshots.

We should just pick a reasonably simple, subtle, and nice looking window
manager and (default) theme.  Oh yeah - and it should be pretty
GNOME-compliant.  And it should have readable fonts and good contrast.  
And it should be easy to get, install, and configure.  And reasonably
stable.  And it can't have any proprietary logos in it.  There can't be
that many wm's or themes which satisfy all this.  In fact, I think this
excludes all of them.

Okay - I say we  make a short list of suggestions, vote, and use that.

If people agree on a vote, lets have somebody put together a short list of
the gnome-compliant wm's {E, WM, sawmill, icewm, ?} and a screenshot from
each using the default theme.  

Okay - I put up some screenshots at:
http://www.gnome.org/gdp/screenshots/screenshots.html

If there are any additions to this list or if I didn't use the default
theme/font, just send me a screenshot and I'll add it to the list.

We should decide pretty soon, because it would be nice to have this
straightened out early enough to fix the screenshots for GNOME 1.2.

Dan