On Tue, 18 Jul 2006, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Yes, easily getting an overview of what's in the help file.
Good point. To summarize:
* We'd like an overview of what's in all the help files. Perhaps some
kind of table of contents for the whole thing.
* We'd like to be able to search all the help files in one go.
* We'd like to be able to have cross-links between help files.
And one suggestion for fixing these problems is merging the help
documents. Is this about it?
I have this obsession with getting the big picture. Keyword search isn't
everything, as many long google hours have tought all of us, right? And
I mean on-screen, I can't carry around a printout.
Does it have to be in a .lyx-file?
Would a single PDF be ok with you?
Or would it be useful if it was in HTML?
As you know, Lyx is pretty bad at handling multiple open documents,
which contributes to my desire to have only one relevant file.
To be honest, it was three years since I wrote anything big using LyX. But
then I didn't find it that difficult using multi-part documents. Maybe my
expectations were low.
I read some of your links. Most of the reasons seem either outdated
and/or developer-/maintainer-centric, as opposed to user-centric.
Well, developer-/maintainer-centric carries a *lot* of weight with me.
The most difficult part about documentation is getting it to be updated.
The second most difficult part is getting it written the first place.
Btw, these are some of the most important reasons for why I started the
LyX wiki. I wanted to let "normal" LyX users as well as developers be able
to contribute to the overall documentation in a more easy way.
It has not been a total failure, but the information the wiki has
certainly not been kept as up-to-date as I'd like. One reason is probably
the lack of editor(s).
However, I can see that maybe "customization" doesn't need to go into a
consolidated manual. That would bring us down to a relatively minor
reform: only merge user guide and extended features.
Maybe we could eat the cake and still have it without too much work...
What if we can come with a way that let's us keep the official
documentation partitioned as it is, but have it automatically be merged
into a single document for users such as yourself?
LyX isn't released that often, so even manually doing the merge once
during each (major?) release might not be too work.
What would this require?
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
