The manual is largely reference material, is structured as reference material, and largely, is structured the same way as most other manuals.
Its not end to end reading.
No, it’s not. We are talking about the cases in which, for the reader, it’s not obvious where the information that they are looking for might be, as in the case of the OP.
This is not a criticism to DT manual, it’s a general issue that novices have when accessing large bodies of non trivial documentation.
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I’ve always hoped that this is where the community would step in. But by-and-large its only @garibaldi for written stuff. The YouTube videos are good, but people have their preferences.
Leveraging the pirated commons of humanity for our own gain doesn’t line up morally for me. Also it can not be free (as in beer) for that much longer. Investing time and effort would be a bad move IMHO.
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I wrote a tutorial for my wife this week, so it’s in German.
https://net-fx.de/darktable-2/darktable-fuer-einsteiger/
It worked well, though. The first laugh came after she opened Darktable and asked me if the program was broken. So we switched to a different darktable theme.
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Am I the only one who, when starting out with software like this, would at least skim read from beginning to end?
Heck, I did this with the Unix man pages, on paper, over thirty years ago. At least reading the headings and the descriptions. Stopping to ream more of the things that looked useful/interesting.
How else to know, what is there? What it might do? Is is such an arduous thing to at least browse through it? I think not.
(Just an passing admission: we are having this particular instance of this conversation in the context of a darktable feature that is difficult to see or find unless one is told or stumbles upon it. It would be nice if it was mentioned on the drawn masks manual page. (Do shout if it is and I missed it))
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This is an unfair generalization, not all models are trained in that fashion, e.g., https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus.
I wouldn’t piggyback ChatGPT, as Auerelien did, but rather consider some small, academic LLM, trained on public domain data, fine-tuned on DT resources and hosted locally on the “beefy server” [tm]. This wouldn’t be a general purpose, know-it-all smartass model, but something that could help users find information more easily. LLMs can be very good retrieval engines.
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I think watching this over the years and seeing many of the comments, people are looking for a document like this for darktable…
https://artraweditor.github.io/Book
I recall a really good Dutch one at one time but it was also at a time where DT was changing quite a lots so its not a trivial exercise to produce the document in the first place and then keeping it current is another thing.
There are some nice sections in the darktable manual that do explain things in terms of workflows so its not all slider definitions but I think many people are geared for something like the link above…
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You’re not alone out there. I read a lot in the manual - multiple times each and every day so far. I used to watch many videos as well trying to understand and put into practice everything presented by dt. I’m not yet halfway for sure.
For me it is difficult to find more technical info like ‘how to organize a second dt installation’ or ‘how to troubleshoot OpenCL’. This forum should be organized along tags but I guess they’re not extensively used by posters. So sometimes it is hard to find back knowledge which is certainly here.
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Have downloaded the Dutch book - as I’m a native Dutch speaker - to see how it is setup. I would like to contribute in documenting dt. No matter what form will be best. I feel others have to decide about that. I am hesitant however to do this as I’m only a couple of month here - I realize in some aspects that to be useful too - as it may easily be I utter total and complete nonsense.
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Throughout my studies, I only attended courses with mandatory attendance. For everything else, I chose books that were easy for me to understand. This saved me a lot of time to work and finance my studies.
For others, the lectures were very valuable; everyone is different.
Perhaps it’s enough to understand that the Darktable manual isn’t sufficient for new users and that referring to it isn’t always helpful.
I also think that the manual shouldn’t/doesn’t have to be the sole function for new users. They need a different form of support.
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And clutter all modules with that? Not sure it would be best just to workaround something that is documented.
@Pascal_Obry What about right click on “show and edit mask elements” (arrow-like thingy) to show related options (i.e., mask elements color)? No extra space required, and the control would be just there where one needs it.
If I right click on it now I see the list of module presets, which does not seem very relevant in this context.
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It’s beefy, but not that beefy. No GPU, thus, no model running.
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We will have to wait for efficient CPU serving or a beefier server then (or someone hosting it somewhere else) 
I see he updated it from the link I shared …did you get the new one??
I got the 3.6 version, will check the website though…
Downloaded the dt 5.0 version as well. Thanks for the tip!
Check! Found the 5.0 version.
You are fast 
Yes! And I would absolutely buy it. I like reference manuals. I also like the more tutorial form of writing. And I like to get different peoples’ takes on the same thing. (this applies to videos too). If darktable suddenly became more famous and inspired a flurry of books, commercial or free, they’d be on my bookshelf or in my digital library.
(One of the reasons I came to dt from a brief spell with rawtherapee was that I found it and its documentation easier to understand)
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