Elle's Writing and Articles

Software GIMP
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So far so good; my head didn’t hurt :stuck_out_tongue:. If I may, a couple of suggestions on readability:

  • Try to avoid the large boxouts that characterize some of your articles.

    I tend to lose track of what I am reading because they can break the flow of the article. I find myself having to scroll up and down repeatedly to review what I have read. This is especially problematic on a mobile device with a small screen, where I don’t even know where the box begins and ends.

    If a large boxout is necessary, there are creative ways around the flow problem such as relegating it to an endnote with return links or shrinking the images.

  • Add return links to the Page Contents box. If your article is super long, add Section Contents boxes.

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Hi @afre and thanks! for the input regarding viewing on mobile devices. Also I’m glad your head didn’t hurt!

Hmm, I don’t really know what you mean by “boxout”. I’m guessing you mean the boxes created by putting a border around the html5 figure element? Or something else? Can you provide a link to a specific page that has that problem?

I realize that “figure” is intended to be “moveable anywhere on the page”, but I don’t use “figure” that way. I use the border and the lighter background to communicate that “this all goes together”. Maybe I should refrain from doing this.

Now I’m confused. For a long time now I’ve have html code in place that is supposed to shrink images if the browser window gets smaller than 54rem wide, and checking google, the code seemed to pass (haven’t checked recently). Here’s a screenshot of a portion of the tutorial shown with the brower window variously sized smaller: http://ninedegreesbelow.com/files/tutorial-screenshots.jpg

I just added some new code to the LCH tutorial notes page to remove the border and padding from “figure” when the screenwidth is smaller than 27rem (shown in the screenshot; previously the figure and image would just get narrower, but the border would remain in place). I checked on a very small android tablet and the tutorial page looks the same on the android device as it does on my desktop with the browser shrunk down, except on the android the text also was a bit smaller.

Are you saying the images on your mobile device don’t shrink down to fit the available browser window width?

I can add return links to the Page Contents box, though this will take time to redo existing tutorials. What is a Section Contents box?

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Boxout: A piece of text written to accompany a larger text and printed in a separate area of the page. :older_man:

I wrote about the reason in my initial reply but removed it for the sake of brevity. I am not a designer or publisher, so I might have used the term incorrectly. :blush:

In short, boxouts work better in print than on a web page because the flow logic is different. In a browser, the layout of a long-form article is generally top-to-bottom involving lots of scrolling, particularly on smaller and narrower mobile devices. Boxouts in print material have a place on the page or pages in such a way they don’t break the main text. E.g., if they are smaller than a page or a 2-page spread, they tend to occupy less room than the text body. When they are larger, they tend to be at the end of the chapter or section, or relegated to the endnotes in the case of charts and figures.

The problem with the top-to-bottom paradigm, especially when the text width is narrow, is the text becomes a very tall wall and unpleasant to read and scroll through; therefore, challenging to follow. For this reason, newspapers tend to layout the articles with narrow columns, in short sentences that are spaced out like paragraphs. Body text is also simple, packed and hyphenated. If there are lists, they aren’t longer than 1-2 short (incomplete) sentences. And so on.

When one includes boxouts, multiple levels of chapters, sections, subsections, lists and nested structures, it gets so overwhelming that the reader may give up or get an unintended condescending vibe. It is especially difficult for readers with disabilities. Same with images, if they are taller than the viewport (e.g., as a result of being in portrait orientation), their readability goes down.

The _boxout_s on this page don’t appear to be responsive to me. On a mobile device (Android, Firefox), I am unable to scroll or zoom to see the rest of the box.

If the article becomes unwieldy, it may be a good idea to include a table of contents for the sections themselves. But then, it might be a good idea to split the article or rewrite it. :laughing:

1 Like
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You make excellent points. On the one hand, making the material on my website more readable is an ongoing struggle. On the other hand, I’m not planning to rewrite the articles to meet the “attention required” level of a newspaper being casually read on a mobile phone.

Thanks! for letting me know. I fixed this article so the images now resize when the screen is smaller. I also removed the frame around the images. So no more “appearance of a box-out”. I plan to do this with all the articles on my website, will require rewriting the css.

I agree, shorter articles are easier to read. Agreeing is one thing, finding the time and energy to rewrite my website is another! :slight_smile:

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Depending on what you want, we may be able to help :wink:

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@Elle I probably said too much. :blush: Your website is already very good. :slight_smile:

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I’m planning to completely rewrite the above “intro” tutorial on LCH. In the meantime I posted a follow-up tutorial:

“Using LCH to pick complementary colors and for making hue-based color harmonies”

The tutorial shows with three examples, how to do three things using LCH:

  1. Put warm highlights and cool shadows on a sphere, using an off-complementary color harmony.
  2. Color a black and white photograph to emulate early morning lighting.
  3. Use LCH to color a sphere using a triadic color harmony, of course with the requisite warm and cool colors for the shadows and highlights
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Another good article: learning a lot. :slight_smile:

I would give note #3 more prominence. Maybe a passing mention at the start because it is a real problem when viewing the illustrations on low-budget screens. I am not an artist but in E1 I am wondering about the hue choice of the 6 shadow and whether the 7 window light should have an effect on the luminance layer.

On JCH, etc. It occurred to me that the more sophisticated a model is, the more nuances and variables it has, and the more informed decisions we would have to make about it. Practically, there is no way an average person or even a very smart person can process such matters even if GIMP acquired the ability to use JCH. Decisions based on assumptions and generalizations would need to be made for them by developers who might not be sure about the nuances themselves. Quite the rabbit hole if you ask me!

This line of thinking came to me when I was viewing handprint : artist's color wheel (CIECAM version) to which you linked and my mind began to explode :nerd_face::dizzy_face:

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No, you haven’t said too much, not at all. There are articles on my website that even I have trouble reading, which is really sad given that I’m also the person who wrote said articles. If my formatting adds to the problem, well, the formatting needs to change :slight_smile: .

One thing I would like is for these two articles to be updated for GIMP 2.9.5/6 - a lot has changed since these articles were written, and a lot is still the same:

There are several additional articles on my website that I think would make good high bit depth GIMP tutorials for either pixls.us or gimp.org, or both, specifically these:

Unfortunately I’m not prepared to do whatever work might be required to update/transfer these tutorials, though of course I can help proofread. The problem (one problem) is that my wrist is still giving me a lot of trouble when I type too much, which I’ve been doing with the two new LCH tutorials.

The reason I’ve been working on the two LCH tutorials is because LCH is such an amazing new capability for GIMP, and I’d like to see it off to a good start with users who wonder what this LCH stuff is about. But these are the last two tutorials I’m planning on trying to write, at least for the foreseeable future.

It might be nice to transfer everything about “Elle’s tutorials and writing style” to a separate thread, for purposes of perhaps working up updating/transferring some tutorials to gimp.org/pixls.us. That would leave this thread focussed on LCH and the two LCH tutorials. Thoughts?

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I agree. @patdavid @paperdigits please help.

My lateral thinking isn’t helping the readability of this thread lol.

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Yes I can help sometime in the near-ish future.

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@afre, just to let you know, I’m rewriting the tutorial to incorporate your suggestion regarding screens and the colors for the red sphere, but will wait until the split threads are sorted out before posting any more LCH-related material.

@patdavid , @paperdigits - thank you! for splitting the thread and for offering to help with the tutorials.