Re: dia outline

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sun, 3 Sep 2000, Kevin Breit wrote:

> Hey,
> 	Dan Mueth and myself have been working day and night trying to
> get the Dia outline done.  So why am I showing this to yawls?  
> Because we're hoping that we'll model future templates off of this.  
> So, here is the outline.  I think we should all try to take a look at
> this since this is maybe a model for the future templates. Thanks
> Kevin

I'd like to de-emphasize the word 'templates' here.(more below)  What we'd
like you to do is look at this outline and think of how well this works
for Dia and how it can be improved.  It would also be nice to hear more
generally what people think is good about it, and what is bad.

This is a sort of test-case for some of our ideas on how we can change the
style of our documents from our old GUI-driven style/template to a new,
more user-friendly style.  Hopefully from working on this outline, writing
this doc, and then looking at the final product, we can try to generalize
some concepts of what works well and what doesn't.  The ideal end result,
aside from having a good Dia doc, will be to have (1) a good reference doc
(Dia Manual) which people can look at to get ideas from, and (2) a short
set of suggestions for writing techniques that work (and ones that don't).  
I no longer believe that we can have a cookie-cutter template which all
documents can follow and still be good.  <insert sighs of relief> But we
can hopefully have examples of good and bad docs and some suggestions to
help writers write good docs.

Dan