On 29.01.2012 21:42, Richard Stallman wrote:
You misunderstood, we do not educate about ISO 3200 on the front page, I meant educate about the basic concept of Software Freedom and Open Standards (in 2-3 sentences). Like it is right now, but removing the part about "different versions of pdf", as discussed earlier in our mails.
That is true. I must have confused my memory of this with some other text I saw in this discussion. Please forgive me.
No problem at all.
Looking again at that page, I think what makes it confusing is that it mentions various topics without saying anything about them. For people who know nothing about them, that will not read well.
Here's what I suggest for the beginning of this page:
<h2>Get a Free Software PDF reader!</h2><p>The<a href='pdf-format.en.html'>Portable Document Format</a> (PDF) is a popular format for publishing formatted text and documents. You can read it with<a href='http://www.fsfe.org/documents/freesoftware.en.html'>Free Software</a> that respects your basic four freedoms to use, study, share and improve them. This gives you control over your computer and helps protect your privacy.</p>
The idea is to move the "education" into pdf-format.en.html.
That sound reasonable.
See how simple and clear that is?
> This simple change is extremely important. The recommendations must > be CLEAR. > ... > So don't make people decide! Recommend ONE reader for each platform. > See PlayOgg.org as an example. We do recommend readers on the platforms, thats whats achieved with the green backgrounds (depends on Javascript, I think, so you might not have noticed, if you have that blocked).
Yes I noticed the green backgrounds and I understood them, even though I have Javascript disabled. (Does it really depend on Javascript? Maybe there is a bug in the browser configuration.)
You are right, it doesn't require JS, we changed that sometime ago, I had just forgotten about it.
So I know what the page looks like and what it means. Please listen to me when I say it is a problem!
You have a table that lists 13 different PDF readers, with some of them highlighted for each system. The message of this is complex. That complexity is the problem. If you don't make it simple, users will get discouraged.
Look at PlayOgg.org. We mention ONLY ONE Ogg player. There are others, of course, but we don't mention them. It would be counterproductive to show people such complexity here.
Yes, you are right about that. It is a criticism we received a few times, and it's something we planned on changing anyhow.
Please insert a list like this:
<ul> <li> On MS Windows, install<a ...>Evince</a>. <li> On MacOS, install<a ...>Vindaloo</a>. <li> On GNU/Linux and other free operating systems, you probably have a free PDF player installed already. Try displaying a PDF file and see! If that doesn't work, you can install one; see<a ...>advice</a>. </ul>
Something similar was planned, but I think right now, it is really best to do all the changes in one go, so that we don't duplicate efforts, trigger useless translations et cetera.
I am quite busy the next couple of days, but I will try to draft some mockups of the new page, based on what we discussed and what pdfreaders@ had planned, until end of the week.
Than we can discuss further steps based on these, more concrete plans, ok?