01.06
openArtist comes with a sophisticated help system which will guide you to the most important programs, and the most important things for these programs. Read the help before you post to the forums!
Help Menu
There is now a Help Menu which allows quick access to various topics, and kinds of help.
Just click the Help Button on top Panel and you can dive in.
there are four different kinds of help:
Application Tooltips
If you navigate the menus, you can see big tooltips for most applications. These hint you to the applications abilities and contain sometimes descripions of what you can expect when you start the application or script.
Video Tours
these are intros to openArtist, can be found on Desktop, via the Help Menu or in /home/tux/documentation/z#Video tutorials. interface, help-system and highly configured are the starting ones.
Expect them to Grow, as these lie in a shared folder. Record your own (preferably with Collaboration > gtk-recordMyDesktop ), and contribute.
- the help which appears if you hover over the icons in the menus:
Instead of a quick description (e.g ‘you can paint with this program’), there is fully fledged information available, if you just hover over an icon in the menu. What you really can do with it, Intros, Features, pros and cons, some descriptions how to use it, what distinguishes it from other programs etc.
Its a really convenient way to discover the programs you need and learn about new ones.
The Mindmap
The Mindmap is the base help system of openArtist.
In the Mindmap, is help included for every program. It is sorted in the same way as the Menu structure.
(So if you e.g click on 2d in the menu, there is Gimp, then Inkscape, then a sub-folder called Vector Graphics. this structure is reassembled in the Mindmap.)
Basically its a knowledge vault with web-links to all relevant places for a program, collected into one central resource.
So the most interesting stuff about a program (links to tutorials, you-tube videos, documentation, wikibooks, plugins, scripts, other websties etc.) is on one place. No need to do a google search to find out more about that program…
You have direct access to the Sub-Mindmaps (2D, 3D Audio, Video …) via the Help Menu.
F1 is now set as help key, it will start the Mindmap. The Mindmap can also be found in Help Menu, in Firefox (with its web interface) and in the Collaboration category.
The Mindmap is NOT read-only! You can easily add things to the Mindmap. (seek for how to edit the mindmap, its on lower left corner on top page of the Map).
The Mindmap is shared. If you change something, these changes will be available for EVERY OTHER openArtist user AND it will also change the openArtist Website, as the Website is the Mindmap and vice versa. So be gentle. Praise for the Mindmap, and help building it.
local (shared) help
there is also local help, you can browse it in the help menu, or in /home/tux/Documentation.
This local help is actually a shared one. It holds all docs and stuff which came with the programs (example files, tutorials…) AND it holds everything what openArtist users Contribute.
Aim is to build a sophisticated library with learning material and testfiles for most of the programs.
So contribute if you find a nice tut, or nice way to use an app, or just provide a patch you have made so that others can learn from it. If you find some cool tutorial, create a introductory example, and save it there, all openArtist users will have it in their Documentation folder and can benefit from it.