Michele wrote:
Dear All,
Brace yourself: veeeeeery long message follows.
As announced some time ago I took the liberty of restructuring
chapters 6 and 7 of the Writer guide.
I dismembered the two chapters and rebuilt them giving them a structure so that:
- Chapter 6 is an introduction to styles. The user learns to apply,
manage and the very basics of modifying styles. It explains all the
options of the styles and formatting window and explains how to create
a outline, how to associate styles to keystrokes, how to use
conditional styles.
- Chapter 7 is a more advanced description on the various formatting
options for styles and contains advanced usage examples.
I also grabbed this occasion to move some topics to chapter 3 (basic
formatting) and consolidated all the page numbering material in
chapter 4. Details follow.
The 4 chapters have been just uploaded and submitted.
DETAILS:
Info for PHB and a question: I tried hard not to add too many figures
(14 in total) and to avoid the need to change existing ones (3). As I
trust you will redo all the screenshots with the Silver theme, I just
tried to give you an idea of what I would like to show. Actually I
should gain soon admin rights on my work PC which runs WindowsXP so I
can switch to the XP Silver theme and give a hand with the
screenshots: which program do you use to capture the screenshots?
A summary of the new figures is given at the end of each changelog, in
some cases I added some text in angle brackets <> describing what I
would like.
_______________________________________
Chapters changeLog:
Chapter 3: (changes revision marked)
- Added some information on options for paragraph justification
- moved the description of default tab stops from chapter 7 to this chapter
- moved the example of nested lists from chapter 7 to this chapter
New screenshots for figures: 9
Optional screenshots: 18, 19, 20 (title of the dialogs is not the right one)
_______________________________________
Chapter 4 (changes revision marked)
- Reformatted the Page numbering section adding the examples given in
chapter 7 and giving it a different structure.
New screenshots for figures: none
_______________________________________
Chapter 6 (no revision marks)
The first level outline now looks like this:
Introduction
The Styles and formatting window
Applying styles
Modifying styles
Management of styles
Assigning styles to shortcut keys
Defining a hierarchy of headings
Working with conditional paragraph styles
New screenshots for figure 2
_______________________________________
Chapter 7 (no revision marks)
Despite my best efforts this chapter became very long...
Here's the outline (at level 1 only):
Introduction
Creating custom (new) styles
Working with paragraph styles
Working with character styles
Working with Frame Styles
Working with Page Styles
Working with List Styles
Example: Creating custom paragraph styles
Example: Creating a simple List Style
Example: Setting up a book chapter sequence of pages
New screenshots for figures 1, 6, 7, 9, 13, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27
Optional screenshots: 5
Cheers,
Michele
I'll just copyedit chapters 6 and 7 for now and not rearrange the
topics, in case you want to reorder any material. As Jean said, chapter
3 will have some matter out of sync for one reading the guide
sequentially from front to back. BOTOH, not everyone reads that way and,
instead, may use a guide only as a reference and, therefore, much of the
order of topics may not be important.
My take would be to consider chapter 6 in the eyes of a novice and use
chapter 7 for the more advanced topics, such as for filtering styles. As
to conditional usage, I see no harm in covering that also in chapter 7,
instead of chapter 6, but not omitting it entirely. The keyboard
shortcuts also could be included in an appendix for the appropriate
chapter(s).
Various texts may employ separate appendices at the end of some
individual chapters. That might work better than having an omnibus
appendix at the end of the guide for those only wanting to cover a
chapter of material and not want to the read the other chapters. Maybe
some comments from other writers or reviewers may help. Or from anybody,
for that matter...
More later--after I read the chapter(s).
--
Gary Schnabl
2775 Honorah
Detroit MI 48209
(734) 245-3324
