What do you use to make animated/gif instructions?

[jameshahnii]

Not sure I’m using the right terms here, but documentation is going to be key to adoption for my community. Need to be able to include instructions that tell and show. What do y’all use to make those kind of images and share them in Discourse?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I am not sure this topic is really about Discourse?

[HAWK]

I’ve moved this to community
There is probably value to be had in sharing the ways that people document and/or communicate Discourse in their communities.

[Mittineague]

@jameshahnii

What do y’all use to make those kind of images and share them in Discourse?

I know of no way to make them in Discourse. But to post them, I simply upload them. eg

[HAWK]

It’s possible that I’m misunderstanding the question here.

I thought we were talking about animations for communicating Discourse features like below (which @robmc made).

[Mittineague]

For simple animated screen captures I’ve used LICEcap. I’ve not used any others so I have nothing to compare it to. It isn’t something I would expect many members to be interested in doing, but it would be worth trying if the goal is to provide visuals for “how to use the Discourse GUI” tutorials.

EDIT
here’s a crude first try example

[jameshahnii]

Yes, apologies for the confusion. I couldn’t find an example quickly, but that’s exactly what I’m after.

[robmc (Robert McIntosh)]

Actually this was from @codinghorror’s original blog post, but yes, you can use LICEcap to create them if you need a new one.

Moving this back to Discourse, what sort of of instructions are you looking to create @jameshahnii? Can you give me examples? I’m working on some documentation projects and this will help me see what is required, but I might also have material to point you to

[jameshahnii]

Just downloaded LICEcap, love it. Thank you!

I am documenting how to do everything in my community. I’m modeling the format after @Johani’s Developer’s guide to Discourse Themes. It’s quite a project, but I believe essential to drive adoption for our users. Oil and gas professionals are not the most digitally proficient guys out there, but if you give them good documentation they’ll figure it out.

Spent the day documenting yUML and Mathjax. It’s a very, very rough draft, but you can see where this is all headed here: https://bitkcor.com/t/how-to-use-bitkcor/43

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

For the animated clips in our release videos, my toolbox is exceedingly simple:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/product-feature-homepage-design-question/68745/3?u=erlend_sh

[merefield (Robert)]

@jameshahnii

Spent the day documenting yUML and Mathjax. It’s a very, very rough draft, but you can see where this is all headed here: How to use bitkcor - Feedback & Support - bitkcor

That’s a long long page. Just a suggestion, but you might like to add links within your TOC using markdown which will allow you to deep link to specific parts from elsewhere too:

Link to a heading within a post or topic

In very long posts, it can be helpful to structure the text with headings that make it more readable. This also allows users to link directly to a section of a large post. To create a heading with markdown, prefix a line text with a number of # characters corresponding to the level of the heading. For example: ## This is a level 2 heading Here is a short paragraph afterwards. ### This is a level 3 heading Here is another short paragraph. Looks like this: This is a level 2 heading Here…

[jameshahnii]

@merefield

That’s a long long page. Just a suggestion, but you might like to add links within your TOC using markdown which will allow you to deep link to specific parts from elsewhere too:

Thanks man. Once spent a year re-writing all of this technical documentation, along with compiling and writing the entire glossary. Anchor tags became my best-good friend. Definitely will be plenty in this page when it’s all done, just an extremely rough draft right now.