John Weiss wrote:
Doesn't follow a strucutred concept, eh? Maybe you should read the mailling list archives before insulting me.
Sorry I wouldn't harm anybody. I didn't know that there is an active doc maintainer. I asked that on the docs- list a year ago and nobody replied. Are you the current doc maintainer?
I missed a structured concept in that way, that I often have to search in all three parts, the UserGuide, Customization and Extended for keywords to find the information. For a normal user it is often not clear what is extended or what might be in the UserGuide.
But anyway, I added a sectipon with a description of all menus. There are listed the relevant sections describing a menu, so that the user will have a good starting point to search the docs.
E.g. not all menus are described and there is no explanation for the icon buttons under the menu bar.
Since tooltips will tell you what they do, it becomes obvious which menu items they're shortcuts for. If you don't know the corresponding menu item, then you clearly don't need it yet.
That's not right. E.g. I worked with on many documents, but it lasts a year until I found out what the toolbar button "FONT" does. Now that that I know this, it is the button I use the most.
Not all of the menus are described because one doesn't need to know what they all are.
But that's the intention of a UserGuide!
Another example: After three years using LyX, I now found out what the menu Navigate->Bookmarks does and how I can change the number of available bookmarks. This feature is very useful for me, but wasn't described in the docs.
As you can see undescribed menus won't be used.
and ironic comments. (These comments are often funny but shouldn't be part of a manual.)
...because manuals should be as dry as dust, and so boring that nobody looks at them?
Yes of course ;-) I mean commands like "If you use Export->PostScript you can start drinking a coffee" (translated from the german docs). If users don't laugh about it, it scares them off. Nobody read a UserGuide from the beginning to the end. Except of the tutorial, docs are used as reference book.
At last I want to merge the Customization and Extended manual. Some of its stuff will be part of the UserGuide.
Bad Idea. I suggest you look through the mailing list archives for my earlier emails where I describe the structure of the docs. These two files were split off for a reason.
I've already done adding some of the customization stuff to the UserGuide. In my opinion sections like the one describing the preferences should be in the UserGuide.
But we should discuss such issues if I've an alpha version ready. Because copy/paste sections and changing layouts could be done easily. I'll concentrate to update the docs and to add more information.
I started once with a new layout for the UserGuide in koma-script book format.
<sarcasm> ...because *everyone* is German and therefore uses a German-centric LaTeX class like koma-script. </sarcasm>
My experience form the lyx-users list is, that people from very different countries use koma-script. This package doesn't have any german special in its layout, even its letter class uses EN/DIN-norms by default. (only the author is German). I like it for its features like printspace calculation (typearea) or support for caption formatting. (no need for additional packages, like caption or tocbibind)
But you should have read till the end of my message: I go back to the standard book class.
Right now, I have doubts. I read a lot of high-flying ideas from you, with very little grounding in practicality. Let me give you an example of what I mean by "practicality": The "Customize the X keyboard for non-US-English". We added that because the lists were getting about 2-3 "Heeeelp Meeeee" messages a month asking for this information. There was a practical reason for adding it to the docs, so in it went.
Describing additional things like setup X-issues will hamper it keeping the docs up to date. Things changes so fast - especially every Linux
distribution is different. Therefore I want to get rid of it.
As you mentioned the lyx-users list, you should browse it through the
last years to have an impression about actual problems. There are almost the same questions:
- Why does the font look pixeld in the pdf-output. - Formula issues - encodings (unicode) - bibtex issues
And these are the ones I add to the docs now.
So why I'm high-flying?
The book is an idea, but not to be done alone and within two months. I
just asked about opinions and experiences with that. Possibly the book will never be published.
There were practical reasons for the division of the docs.
I've never said, that I want to merge them all together.
And, in the case of the docs, can you put yourself and your own agenda (printable book) aside and make decisions grounded in practical, broad-user-community-consensus-based reasons?
I introduced LyX to my institute and also to elder people - mostly
Win-users. The last time I send 50 mails per month to the users-list answering questions. So you can believe me that my intention is to introduce things that are "broad-user-community-consensus-based".
And now let us please discuss at a normal level.
tahnks and regards Uwe
