On Mon, Sep 30, 2019, at 12:42, Isabelle Hurbain-Palatin wrote: > > > > I think for consistency's sake, the idea of a group of commands looking > > like this.... > > * > * > > *Ctrl+A* > > *Shift+L* > > *Ctrl+(right click)* > > *Alt+(scroll wheel)* > > > > ....makes more sense than.... > > > > *Ctrl+A* > > *Shift+L* > > *press/hold the Ctrl key and right click* > > press/hold the Alt key and scroll the mouse wheel > > I agree with that, and I have some more arguments in favor on top of > consistency :) > ... > Admittedly, I do not know how this reads for people who do not > have a certain amount of "computer fluency", which would be my concern > (and which probably is Microsoft's).
I also have a personal preference for the more concise form, and I *believe* this type of description to be well understood *by the intended audience*... which, if true, seems like a valid reason for departing from the MS style guide. If there's a general consensus, maybe someone could put together a simple "quick guide" to use as a reference rather than the MS one. > * From a "documentation writing" perspective, it does feel harder to me > a priori to go for the sentence without having things getting > cumbersome, especially if the sentence is already convoluted (which > shouldn't happen, but, well, nobody's perfect :) ). I find it happens all too easily when trying to describe this type of thing. Producing something with good readability is a skill completely dintinct from having a good understanding a topic... some have even suggested that there's an inverse correlation. ;-) Concerning the new not-yet-documented features, I would say that it's probably easier for someone on the "understanding" side to quickly check a highly readable document for correctness than to work in the opposite direction, for whatever that's worth. > And "rotate the wheel", in particular, feels very unnatural to me. This is > however a > gut feeling issue, and from a non-native speaker as well, so it may not > be shared. I completely agree with this (and am a native speaker). In general, my gut feeling is to avoid overly-specific descriptions of physical actions as much as possible. How this impacts readability among different segments of the audience is something I can only speculate about, but there's another issue: it makes more sense to describe, as much as possible, *the input that darktable expects to see in order to trigger an action*, while making the fewest possible assumptions about the input device the user is using. While *most* people may be using a mouse, there are also trackpads, trackballs, pen tablets, touch screens, etc... not to mention all kinds of alternative keyboard mappings. For this reason, I would say "Scroll" should be preferred to "Scroll Wheel", for instance. Anyway, that's my "two cents". As an additional aside, I get the impression that non-native speakers are overly insecure about their overall grasp of how to structure information in English. As a native speaker, I find it very difficult to avoid the constant tendency to use idiomatic forms that feel natural to me, but don't actually parse as good, simple English which would be most easily understood (and translated) by non-native speakers. I suspect non-native speakers are much better at this, and it's an easy matter for a native speaker to then make any small adjustments to grammar and syntax (since native English is well known to not follow any sane set of rules in this regard). Keep in mind that most native English speakers are exposed to a *wide* variation in the use of the language, and are probably less critical about "correct usage" than some native speakers of other languages might be (I had a very interesting discussion with my native Russian speaking neighbors about this recently). Don't worry about the little things! -- jys ___________________________________________________________________________ darktable developer mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org
