LongImageIncorporationProcess

"Do you take digital photographs?"

"Yes."

"So how long does it take you to get them on a Web page so the rest of the family can see them?"

"Oh, I wouldn't know how to do that."

-- Tim Berners-Lee

It just takes too damn long to get from putting a drawing on paper, or snaping a photo (even with a DigitalCamera,) to putting it into a wiki page.

Let's suppose you're lucky, and have a WacomTablet.

And assume you're looking at a wiki page that you want to put a drawing into.

You have to:

Open up the drawing application.
Draw your drawing with the WacomTablet.
Click "Save File."
Decide where in the world you're going to save this image, and what you're going to call it. (I recommend a TemporaryDirectory.)
Go back to the wiki page you were looking at.
Hit "Edit this Page."
Make up a name for your drawing, for the wiki. (This is the second time now..!)
Hit "Save Changes."
Click on the name of the drawing. (Meaning, you're going to upload the image.)
Find the file that you saved in step 4, with the web browser's own file-finder.
Say "Ok."

Tah-dah. You've now put an image into a piece of InternetPaper.

This is assuming you have a WacomTablet..! If you don't have a WacomTablet, you have a whole ScanningProcess to go through. Let's not even get into that (here.)

Were it a book in your hands, you could just set your pen down and start drawing on it.

So, what kind of future improvements are feasible?

I can imagine that you would do the following process:

Click "Edit this page."
Make up a name for your drawing, for the wiki.
The wiki, realizing that you've put an attachment in, places a Java applet (or whatever) in place of the name of the drawing on the page.
Using the WacomTablet, you draw into the applet. Yes, it's more primitive than your editing application. But it would be a big relief, in many if not most cases.
Hit "Submit drawing" on the Java applet. (Or "Save Changes." Or whatever.)

You might even be able to put 3 Java applet pads by default into the Edit page. You wouldn't even refer to them by name- you'd just say "#1", "#2", and "#3" in the text, and it'd refer to the numbered pad. (You could also "export" the pad, to a "named pad," for reference by other pages, and to free up a pad. But that'd be deferred.) That would free up having to hit "Submit drawing," since the submission is part of the original page submission.

We also want all the ideas on VisuallyOrientedWiki. This page should probably be refactored with that page.

I'm going to put a note to write this idea up into WikiFeatures, eventually.

-- LionKimbro

You've seen DannyAyers SVG-Wiki stuff, right? http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/11/19/svgwiki.html --BillSeitz

even after I see the image on my screen, it takes to long to put it on the web

"Insert an image: It's always nice to be able to grab a screen shot or a video frame and insert it into the minutes you are taking of a meeting -- but how many keystrokes does it take?" -- Tim Berners-Lee 1998 http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Editor

Several people are willing to pay cash to improve this process -- see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47838

math illustrations

[EditHint: probably goes on a different page ... would GfxAlgo be more appropriate ?]

"Creating Mathematical Illustrations" by Mark L. Irons "it actually took six different programs to create the finished illustrations. ... All told, it took at least sixteen steps to make each illustration"

Now that Octave ( http://octave.org/) is available, I suspect it would be a little simpler to re-create similar illustrations ... Surely there's a better way.