Yeah. I agree.
On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 18:46, r coyne wrote: > First, your "documentation" essentially consists > entirely of menu trees, i.e., where to find the > command. But the whole point of menus and windowing > shells generally is supposed to be to eliminate or > greatly reduce the need for that sort of thing. *snip* You're right, the GUI should be obvious. > my suggestion is that you need to include *other* > information as well. So I guess you are saying that a how-to should aim for the sweet spot that adds information to intermediate users and explains things to the novice? > Which brings us to MS's (and abiword's) second > blunder: The SaveAs dialog is unclear and rather > frightening because it confuses and conflates two > totally separate ideas/issues, namely file *type*, > i.e., format, and filename *extension*. What I want > to know is, What will this thing *do* if I click it. > With "save as Word doc" I can sort of guess, because I > know that Word and abi each have a whole bunch of > internal formatting codes that are not the same, and > presumably what I get is a file that uses the Word > codes to correspond to and thus produce in Word a > document that looks more or less the same as the abi > one. But what does it *mean* to "save as HTML"? An > HTML document/file simply *is* text. So will Save As > HTML simply strip out all the abw complexities to > produce straight, old-fashioned text and then tack > ".html" on the end of my specified filename? Or will > it try to translate the abi formatting codes into HTML > formatting tags so as to make it look alike in a > browser, as for the Word case? But that's only > layout; what about links? Will anything that looks > like an Internet address be duplicated (and expanded > into a full URL) in a HTML tag to make it function as > an active link in the HTML document? That's the sort > of thing Yahoo news does, and it's often stupidly > inappropriate and annoying; does abi do it better? > And if there are images and frames and the like in the > abi document, the sorts of things that HTML does by > referring to separate files, will such files be > generated? Where will they be put and what will they > be called? I will try to cover some of this stuff. > you should tell us *something*, enough to give me a > basic, sketchy understanding of what's about to > happen, so that I can figure out whether it's what I > want and whether it's safe and what I'll need to do > later. Without that much, I am left feeling I don't > dare click anything, because who knows what it might Yeah, I agree, and that is what makes a good how to hard when you have a program with so many options. If you just want to burn a data CD, the how-to can be a complete reference. A program like AbiWord has so many potential how-tos > And -- especially since you do offer this > in hypertext format -- you should include a full set > of references/links to the complete documentation, for > those who want more info. I should link to the documentation. I am unsure why I did not do this. Thanks for the feedback. + Jeremiah ----------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body.
