Re: adopting the Style Guide

["Rebecca J. Walter" <rjp mail tele dk>]

> By sending this response I in no way intend to flame you, Rebecca, but to 
> explain the validity of including a suggestion as to voice in the Style Guide 
> since the GIMP documentation project has undertook the task of changing its 
> documentation to 3rd person.
> 
> Maybe you can share with my why the GIMP documentation project chose to 
> undertake this arduous task.

We didn't.  I didn't even know that was happening until now.  We have 1
writer right now.  He is trying desperately to get everything covered. 
Do you have any idea how many plug-ins, dialogs, and tools need to be
documented?  Also our stuff is very technical.  We need to be able to
explain what happens precisely in proper graphical terms AND explain it
normally to the user.  The current goal is content -- to have something
there so the user never gets a "this help is not available" page.  When
that is finished and we have more time (I have been working more than
fulltime for a month and a half.  volunteer work is not something I have
time for right now), we will work out a style guide of our own, probably
strongly based on the GNOME one as it is a good style guide, but taking
into consideration our own needs (like the fact that they are plug-ins
in GIMP and always have been. we are not changing that).  At that point,
syngin and I will work together to proofread and edit all the docs. 
Right now none of us have time.  We could use more volunteers, but it
needs to be people with a very good understanding of graphical image
manipulation.  Even with the skills syngin and I have, we still rely
heavily on the developers themselves for documentation and information. 
If it is easy for syngin to produce content writing in third person, so
be it.  It will be fixed when we rework the docs for 1.3.