Re: (Was The GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation)

["David C. Mason" <dcm redhat com>]

Joakim Ziegler <joakim@styx.net> writes:

> Conglomerate has hotkey support. At the moment, it only supports hotkey
> markup of things you select with the mouse, but this will change. We might
> emulate the Emacs way of doing it, or we might look at finding an even more
> efficient way, but getting the structured writing to be a 1-pass process is a
> concern, as is full mouseless operation. We write quite a lot of structured
> documents internally, and we know that there's a need for this.

Well this sounds good  - and I would love to hear/see  more about it -
so consider my comments here - a constructive comment on my opinions of
GUI SGML/XML markup to date - not just what I saw of Conglomerate.



> > Well your last line will answer one question - I like the indentation
> > as well, but the output from Conglomerate does not indent - does not
> > add returns - in fact, it has NO SPACES between words, phases,
> > sentences, or paragraphs. It is a continuous stream of words that is
> > incomprehensible when someone like you or I use Emacs to work on the
> > doc.
> 
> We are very aware of this. It's definitely on our list of things to fix.
> Please, don't judge the entire Conglomerate project on our release of a
> quick-and-dirty proof of concept pre-alpha. I'm a little dismayed at the
> tendency of people to regard things as writ in stone, even when we
> specifically said that it wasn't, that this is just to show to a certain
> degree how the GUI will work, etc. It seems this information wasn't heeded.
> 
> Instead, tell us about all your concerns, and we will fix them before
> Conglomerate goes to 1.0. We're not some faceless corporation trying to
> develop a very closed system, we want and need your feedback (in particular
> on things we don't know about, of course, as opposed to this problem).

Again - this was less about Conglomerate's early state and more about
the GNOME community missing the point - we need docs damnit! Please
take what I have said as official comments on my first impression -
and feel free at any time to ask me what I think of an idea or
ideas. I would love to see some of the things that apps like Adept got
wrong - done right. I just have no idea how to do so and I hate
contacting projects to complain without some sort of idea on how to
fix it!

> 
> I'm thinking the Conglomerate website might have room for a "Known bugs and
> fixes we plan to make before 1.0" page.


Good idea!


Cheers,

Dave

-- 

          David Mason
        Red Hat AD Labs

        dcm@redhat.com