Re: Title Page Suggestion

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

Just to be clear, I was merely raising this (listing authors on the TOC
page in addition to the titlepage) as an idea to see if others liked it,
and I am not strongly inclined one way or the other.

To answer Pat's question, I think we have flexibility to have differing
information on the TOC page and titlepage if we want it.

Does anybody besides Eric feel we really need to add more of the
information from the Title Page to the TOC page?  If so, please speak up.
If nobody else speaks up as wanting to modify Pat's proposal, I suppose
Pat can assume everybody who hasn't spoken up silently consents and just
move forward with his plan.

Dan


On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Pat Costello wrote:

> Dan et al,
>
> Whereas I can appreciate that individual contributors would want to see their
> name at the top of the TOC, in the case of corporate contributors such as Sun,
> this would be undesirable. If the Sun Microsystems name appears at the top of a
> piece of documentation there could be a wrong impression generated about
> branding and ownership. As the GNOME desktop is a free software initiative, we
> would want to avoid that. The same ownership and branding issue would occur with
> other corporate players such as Redhat, and others who might want to join in
> later.
>
> So, would it be possible to have a situation where we could satisfy both
> requirements? In other words, could we have a setup whereby the author can
> choose to leave the name slot empty on the TOC, providing of course that the
> name slot on the linked Title Page is filled? This course of action would allow
> individual contributors the choice of including their names, and corporate
> contributors could be discreetly credited in the Title Page.
>
> Possible?
>
> Pat
>
>
> > X-Authentication-Warning: enlightenment.uchicago.edu: dmueth owned process
> doing -bs
> > X-X-Sender: <dmueth enlightenment uchicago edu>
> > To: Pat Costello <Patrick Costello sun com>
> > cc: <gnome-doc-list gnome org>
> > Subject: Re: Title Page Suggestion
> > MIME-Version: 1.0
> >
> >
> > On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Pat Costello wrote:
> >
> > > Does anyone else have any opinions about this question?
> >
> > I tend to agree in that I expect the user will start at the TOC and then
> > go to the sections of interest.  If they are concerned that the material
> > may be out of date, are curious who the authors are, or want to know who
> > to email with questions, then they may start looking for the section with
> > this sort of info. We need to make sure it is pretty easy to find.  If we
> > list the titlepage as "Title Page" in the TOC, I'm not sure whether users
> > will know to look there.  I generally would prefer a solution which kept
> > this info on the titlepage if it was easy for users to find though.
> >
> > However, I can think of another reason for adding more info to the TOC
> > page.  One of the top reasons people contribute to free software projects
> > is for recognition, and so it is nice to place the contributors name at a
> > very prominent place.  There is a certain satisfaction to going to an
> > applet or application, choosing Help from the menu, and seeing your name
> > pop up at the top of the window.  It may look somewhat out of place on the
> > TOC page though.
> >
> > Dan
> >
>