So, as some of you may know, Krita has a Manual-wiki thing in the KDE userbase wiki.

Work on it has been occasionally picked up and dropped over the years.

Yesterday there was a question about patterns, and I checked the manual... to find there was no entry for Patterns. So I made an account and from one thing came another...

I added a whole lot of list entries, and as of writing, the Krita-manual is half missing pages.

Let's do something about that!

The first thing I would like to aim for, is having first-draft quality entries for every item. Some information is better than no information after all.
First draft quality would also mean that Non-native English speakers, or people shy about their English in general are certainly welcome to help out.

There's however one big rule: The written content must be by your hand, or with permission of the original writer.
Aside from that, even first drafts will be edited to remove language and tangents unbecoming of an art-program manual.

So how do we do this?
If you can post on this forum, you can access the wiki through your KDE identity, and start editing the Wiki right away.
However, if you are shy for doing that, for whatever reason, you can also post it here instead.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or whatever, you can also post them here.

For second draft:
After a while we're going to need to polish up the language, add markup, images and links, etc. This is not my priority right now.
However, you are free to modify the page by logging into the Wiki with your KDE identity(forum login). The information about the wiki-syntax can be found here: http://userbase.kde.org/Toolbox
Once we have all functionality described(even in broken or terribly mistyped english), we will move to the second draft and polish the pages.

Let's get to documenting!

It might be a good idea to make a blog post about this on Krita.org and reference this forum post. I am not sure how many Krita users look at the KDE forums. The same goes for the other call for help with the site re-design. I am sure there is a lot more Krita users on the Krita site than this forum. Just a thought.

A really ambitious author might also consider combining the Krita manual with working on a book for Packt: http://authors.packtpub.com/let-us-know -- it would be good to have a print book, too

I'm doing a call-for-help on krita.org now.

Hi
I havent been thru the 'how to write a wiki' link but have made a first pass for Preferences>General which I am linking below.
Please check the text and freely edit it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sfmrqc91ad42u18/Preferences_General.odt
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cbwsoi0oceikpg3/Preferences_General.pdf

UPDATE: I had made an error and not included a screenshot for the Arrow Cursor Type. Have made the changes in the files, now they shud be ok.

I have made a page for Preferences>Display
I might be able to do one of these a day. Lets see.
My English might not be consistent, sometimes its american and other times its british !
In the files below I have left some sections blank as I am not aware what they exactly do. Also please check what I have written about filtering, mostly picked from Wikipedia.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8ip7w0lc5yw1jy/Preferences_Display.odt
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hsjpfbizxc6r9yk/Preferences_Display.pdf

Monkey Planet, awesome!
I already added your entries to the manual, though I still need to add all the images you included. You can always submit changes, we're in first draft stage after all!

Thanks TheraHedwig.

I am linking files for rest of the Preferences section. Altho some parts are left blank as I dont know what they do. Also I have made some changes in the files above.
I will proof read everything tomo when I have some time, but for now this part is done, mostly.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/d1ckawgee27sqvg/Preferences_Canvas_Author.odt
https://www.dropbox.com/s/apji0j5uy9wy7x0/Preferences_Canvas_Author.pdf

https://www.dropbox.com/s/icdxdzjtqwa4l9j/Preferences_Color_Management.odt
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wlqedvuhwbju4op/Preferences_Color_Management.pdf

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2fo8rqqozh0ke9l/Preferences_Grid.odt
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s48bmuswvlfifee/Preferences_Grid.pdf

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8pfwd4t87u7uq76/Preferences_Input_Color.odt
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sh8ptjbexnw22tu/Preferences_Input_Color.pdf

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y3wjq2gnlmtsn98/Preferences_Tablet_Settings.odt
https://www.dropbox.com/s/abdrk4ytbgg9h3p/Preferences_Tablet_Settings.pdf

I have corrected some typos, many actually. IMO these files are good to go.

Update : Corrected some pictures and formatting.

@boudewijn: Love the idea about a book with Packt. they have a really large user base, so that would be amazing for marketing and brand awareness as well. Packt has a very large technical audience, so I wonder how receptive the publishers would be to something more artistic? I think if there was a book about Krita, it would be best to have a writer and artist combo that could talk about doing concept art, comics, or illustration - as well as teaching Krita.

I think artists are interested more in art instruction than technical instruction, so a book would generate more interest if a lot of topics would cover art things (environments, characters, painting techniques, etc). Krita would just be the tool that can accomplish those things. The user interface and features would be explained along the way. A title like the following would be neat:

"Painting Steampunk Sci-fi environments using Krita"

That would get my attention!

The reason I was thinking of Packt is that they have done at least one Gimp book.

Hi

At the moment I'm using the sandbox to familiarize with the KDE wiki format. I guess its easier to just dump everything in the wiki and polish the grammar and images little by little. After scouting the manual I' m planning to add screenshots to many of the Wiki sections. For the screenshots Is Darker theme ok, for Krita UI?

You could use sphinx :
http://sphinx-doc.org/

You can create complex documentations with nice themes (like readthedocs.org 's one) and export all to pdf.

But it seems to be more designed for programming docs than graphical stuffs...

Okay, reviving this thread again, because I need help in a way that even the laziest forumnite ought to help with:

Ragukamath and I have been chugging away at this page:
https://userbase.kde.org/Krita/Manual/Basic_Concepts

The page is intended as a crash-course to learning the specifics of a digital medium and to teach the most important functionality of Krita. My question is, 'is it coherent?'.

Do more screenshots need to be added? Do you think certain sections are obtuse? Is the english downright dodgey? Let me know!

It's looking really great! I'm going to share this with some peeps I know. I'm still reading through it, there are some things I actually didn't know about, like liquefy vs deform!

Also there might be a need for basic key shortcuts and settings. We used to have one of those shortcut sheets but I can't remember if they're updated. Like using shift to resize, shift-space to rotate... Also would be good to point out where to edit the settings. I figure it should all be in one place so they know how to customize the ones they want?

Hi ramskulls,

I have made a note to add shortcut sheets to manual. I am preparing it . I will add it soon