Ok folks, here we liberally rip up the Gedit manual and turn it into duck pâté: we Mallardize it.

• Contents page: I'm thinking that if we're reinventing help, let's REALLY reinvent it. Looking at OS X's contents pages, -- why not do something like that: big title, thumbnail screenshot, icon, and only 3 or 4 main topic areas listed, and the whole thing laid out over the whole page rather than a list. DonScorgie created a silly, 2 minute mockup of this: http://www.gnome.org/~dscorgie/Beanstalk.png The meta data system can provide the list of sections, their names and links as well as the icon to use.

  • Getting started with Gedit. This page contains how to start gedit, a bigger screenshot, quickie tour of the interface, and then links to some common activities you might want to do: write plain text; edit configuration files; programming; install plugins. Also links to:
    • About Gedit
    • Running Gedit from the command line
    • Working with multiple documents (tabs etc)
  • Editing text files

    • selecting text, extending the selection, dragging & dropping text, common shortcuts (plugged in from the User Guide)

    • Undo and Redo (plugged in from the User Guide)
    • Using the clipboard (plugged in from the User Guide)
    • Text editing features
      • Change case (plugin document)
      • Insert date/time (plugin document)
      • Sorting (plugin document)
    • Spellchecking (plugin document)
    • Getting Document Statistics (plugin document)
  • Finding and replacing
    • Finding text
    • Incremental search

    • Find & Replace

    • Special characters
  • Printing
  • Programming with Gedit
    • Syntax highlighting
    • Indenting (plugin document)
    • Snippets (plugin document)
    • Compiling from Gedit (plugin document)
    • Modelines (plugin document)
    • Python console (plugin document)
    • Tag list (plugin document)
  • Using Gedit plugins
    • Installing
    • Enabling
    • List of all plugins installed
  • Topic list: flat list of all topics
  • Index: list of index words. Possible only available through a menu item rather than the main contents page?

Some topics are not listed in the main contents but are linked as and when they are required in other pages:

• Opening a document (plugged in from the User Guide)
• Saving a document (plugged in from the User Guide)
• Preferences

Topics I've not found a place for yet:

• File Browser Plugin

Proposal: Don't include anything that someone who launched Gedit on purpose will almost certainly already know. This leads to a simpler outline:

• What is Gedit? (mainly to explain that Gedit is neither a word processor nor an IDE)
• Navigating through documents (includes Go to Line and Interactive Search)
• Finding and replacing
• Plug-ins
  • (subsection on each possible plug-in)
• Customizing Gedit for your work
  • Font, colors, and other appearance settings
  • Syntax highlighting
• Auto-saving and backups
• Using Gedit from the command line (includes piping)

-- MatthewPaulThomas