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Have you ever thought to yourself, "Gosh... I wish I could learn how to use OpenShot"? If so, then you will be very excited about today's announcement.

Open-source projects are often judged on the quality of their documentation. With that in mind, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of the OpenShot Help Manual (Available in English, French, and Spanish)! It contains over 100 topics, 100 illustrations, and even a topic called "Learn OpenShot in 5 minutes"!

We have been hard at work on this for a long time. I would like to especially thank Olivier Girard and Helen McCall for their dedication and hard work. Countless hours have been spent researching, writing, editing, translating, and proof-reading.

The help manual has been added to our PPA in a new package called "openshot-docs". So, if you have already installed OpenShot from the PPA, you should be able to install the openshot-docs package via Synaptic or apt-get.

To launch the help manual (after installing), use this command:
$ yelp ghelp://openshot

To view the HTML version, use these links:

• English Help Manual
• French Help Manual

But wait, is your language missing? Do you want to read our help manual in your own language? If so, please join us and help translate our help manual. It is super easy to do, and 100% web-based. To start translating, and get your name in the credits of OpenShot, follow these steps:

1. Login to LaunchPad (or create a free account)
2. Visit the openshot-docs translation page
3. Click on your language
4. Start translating phrase by phrase

It's really not difficult at all, so we hope you will jump in and contribute to our project. =)

I was hoping to have version 1.0 of OpenShot completed by Christmas, but it will likely slip to January 1, 2010. I have many updates included in version 1.0, so stay tuned for more information.