Re: [Gnumeric] Screenshots in Gnumeric Docs.

[Adrian Custer <acuster nature berkeley edu>]

Hey all,

1) reduced the cc list to gnumeric-list & gnome-doc-list since we are
all on those.

2) Side by side help.
Is there a vision that eventually gnome apps would have a "help-mode"
where clicking on a gui element would send an appropriate signal to the
docs so the docs could jump to a page about that element? I assume this
is horrendously difficult but would be a nice escalation:
 1) Name/words in gui element
 2) Tooltips
 3) Help mode

This was re:

On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 17:01, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On 14 Mar 2002, Kevin Breit wrote:
>
> > I understand the purpose of having a GUI element reference.  I don't
> > really think that they are a huge benefit to most users.  I can't recall
> > the last time I said "What does this button do!?"  If I do question, you
> > have tooltips for the job.
>
> My understanding is that the GUI element reference is linked-to for
> context-sensitive help.  I.e. if you need a little more detail about a
> dialog than the one-phrase tooltip is going to give you.  As such, it's
> not necessarily meant to be read linearly as part of the user docs.
> More like an appendix of some sort.



> task-oriented descriptions often leave out several of the more obscure
> features of a dialog.  if I want to know what the 'in a list' option of
> the 'allow criteria' drop down of the 'validation' page of the
> format->cells dialog means, with perhaps an example, i want the help
> system to jump right there, not to point me to the top of a
> length task-oriented description of how to use gnumeric as a gradebook.
> And no, you won't find examples of 'in a list' in a tooltip.

Some task oriented stuff is really useful. Part of the statistics
diaologs should be partly a tutorial in stats. So the stats docs should
have:
 1) How to do an anova
 2) What an anova is all about (yes this is long term)


One other thing. Kevin, you are worried about the long term. I think
gnumeric is getting to the point where its foundational "look" is not
going to change much over the next few years. Thanks to this stability,
the docs will age much more gracefully than they have in the recent
past. I don't mind newer ideas comming along to improve docs but we
should agree on the foundation. I don't think having 300+ images in the
docs is terribly harmful to anyone but the cvs users. We may want to
split gnumeric-docs out of gnumeric for convinience but I don't think
more docs are particularly harmful. 

cheers.