Re: About GNOME / return / duck related question

[karderio <karderio gmail com>]

Hi :o)

On Thu, 2006-12-07 at 01:34 +1300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Dec 1, 2006, at 11:54 AM, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> > ...
> >> A thought has been rattling around my head for a while. Many GNOME app
> >> manuals are in fact contained in the user guide. It's not quite clear
> >> which apps should have their own standalone manual, and which should 
> >> be in the user guide.
> >
> > I agree, it's confusing for us and for users. I considered moving more 
> > applets into the User Guide, but it's such a monster already, and 
> > doesn't seem worth the effort.
> > ...
> 
> There are some things that most people will not recognize as being 
> distinct "applications", and which should therefore have their help 
> combined into a general "&operatingsystem; Help". These include gdm, 
> gnome-panel, Metacity, Nautilus, gnome-screensaver, and the various 
> Preferences and Administration tools.

Sure, I think I wasn't quite clear. I didn't mean to suggest presenting
these things separate to the user, but rather have them separate in the
source, so the GDM manual would live in the GDM module in cvs, rather
than in the handbook. Thus if somebody installs GDM or the panel with,
say KDE, he would be able to view just the documentation that concerns
him.

I realise this is not necessarily simple to achieve ;)

> >> With Mallard, can we not have each app have it's own manual (thus 
> >> simplifying calling the docs from the app, and letting the app be 
> >> built independently of GNOME), and compose the user guide by 
> >> including content from each app, and adding extra info if necessary. 
> >> Something along these lines could be nice and modular, making things 
> >> much more clear, whereas things currently seem a bit of a mess. 
> >> Perhaps this is the plan already ?
> >
> > That's probably the plan. Or it should be. The reverse also true: I'd 
> > like things like 'Opening a file' and 'Using the clipboard' to be 
> > written in the user guide, and then appear as topics in application 
> > manuals.
> > ...
> 
> If I was having trouble opening an Excel spreadsheet in Gnumeric, and I 
> didn't yet know that Gnumeric didn't offer any help on opening Excel 
> spreadsheets specifically, I would get a bit annoyed if I read through 
> Gnumeric's "Opening a file" help, only to realize that it was 
> word-for-word the same as the "Opening a file" section in almost every 
> other application.

I'm not sure exactly what would be annoying about seeing the same thing
twice... As it stands I think initiated users that consult the help will
inevitably find many things they already know how to do, in which case I
think they will, or should, just skip the section.

As it strands, we must (should) explain the "open file" function for
every app. Currently, a user will sometimes get the exact same text
twice (if we did a copy paste from another man) or a text with the same
meaning with slightly different wording. For us, we have to do the work
twice, for those of us who don't know of copy/paste ;)

Perhaps in this particular case, as you say, it would be best to provide
a link to the appropriate section. I don't think there is a reason not
to be able to reuse content in different places however, this could be
rather handy to us. For example, I think it would be better to have a
"please backup your data..." text directly included in the docs, rather
than a link.

Love, Karderio.