Default tutorial

It is nice for a first time user to have a tutorial to learn how to drive inkscape. I am suggesting making the tutorial document open by a command in the Help menu. We have a beginning of the tutorial in doc/default.svg (to be renamed into doc/tutorial.svg?).

The tutorial should explain how this works so that the user can change the default easily (checkbox in save?).

I'm suggesting we try and get this in for this release, particularly if someone can work on the tutorial to explain some of the features that people tend to miss when they first try out inkscape (knots, offsets, printing to .ps).

Tutorial outline

• Introduce inkscape

• Start the user off with the start (or spiral?) tool
  • use arrow tool to move, scale, stretch
  • click again for rotate shear
  • use node tool to customised shape.

• Other shapes

• Path editing
  • changing the node and segment types
  • keybindings

• importing images

• boolean ops

• offset shape

• printing
  • printing to ps

• exporting pngs

• customising the document
  • setting the default

• reporting bugs

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discuss below

The idea was to have inkscape check for ~/.inkscape/default.svg and open that for "run without any parameters", and if ~/.inkscape/default.svg were missing, to use the system wide default.svg given in doc/default.svg. Do this when inkscape is first installed, perhaps only opening on the first time use of inkscape, perhaps until the user changes their default document settings. This gives us the ability for users to start with their prefered document options (such as page size, colour, etc). --njh

I think the tutorial should come up only when called, not as the default document. As for default document settings, we almost have it already. It now works via the default namedview template in preferences.xml. It allows you to set paper size, color, border width & shadow, grid and guide options, plus zoom and center of view. As for easy setting, I think now the best approach is to add a "save as template" button in the Document Options dialog, now that I've collected all document options into one dialog. Ultimately, we'll need a support for multiple external templates and a "new for template" option, but for now the template in preferences.xml is good enough I think. So the logic is mostly there, except for the button, which should not be difficult to add. But you can edit your template in preferences already, and it may make sense to mention this in docs somewhere... but on the other hand, keyboard shortcuts are more important, and we still don't have them in the Help menu. --bb