> On Aug 28, 2015, at 9:03 AM, Geert Janssens <[email protected]> > wrote: > > That's interesting: your focus appears to be on the "Concepts" aspect of > "Tutorial and Concepts Guide". My focus was rather on "Tutorial". I guess the > name itself is already ambiguous. > > > There’s no chapter on Reports > > You're right there is no separate chapter on reports, but reports are touched > regardless as part of several tutorials. For example 4.7.5 talks about the > cash flow and transaction report. 5.5.5 covers reports relevant to checkbook > management, 6.5.8 is about credit cards, and so on. > > That's what I meant with each tutorial brings together many features of > gnucash, instead of explaining each in isolation.
Fair enough. Let’s turn the T&CG into the GnuCash Manual, with three sections: Concepts, Task-oriented tutorials, and Feature descriptions (not necessarily in that order). > > > or Importing because those don’t really > > need their underlying principles explained. The Help manual should > > indeed explain how everything works in GnuCash, but I don’t think it > > needs to be limited to this-menu-item-does-this-that-button-does-that > > level stuff. > > > Agreed. That would be too limited. The current help manual has always felt > like that though. I'll admit I never managed to read through it. > > Browsing through it today it still mostly feels like an enumeration of > features/menu items windows. Note there are almost no screenshots, another > indication you are supposed to access the help manual by clicking a help > button on a specific dialog or search for help on a specific menu item (in > which case the relevant dialog is already in front of you and a screenshot is > not needed). > > It currently really is a reference manual of what gnucash can do, but much > less so on how to use it. (And an incomplete one at that - several chapters > are placeholders only). > > > I wonder if it might be confusing to new users two have two documents > > and how useful or frequently used help buttons are when we also have > > tooltips. Perhaps we should consider combining them into a single > > document with two sections. > > > I have no idea how frequently the help buttons would be used. I do remember > seeing bug reports in the past because some buttons were not working. So at > least *some* people look at them. So maybe we should focus the help on context-sensitive help and stop trying to publish it as a book. > > Having said that, I also think combining the two would have some advantages. > > Someone would have to do this of course... I fear that a complete overhaul of > the documentation would be a huge task. On the other hand no one says it all > has to be done in one go. Replacing DocBook with Libre/Open Office would both make it easier and get more people to help, but I’ve hived that off to a separate thread. It occurs to me that we might need to keep DocBook for context-sensitive help in Linux. Do we? Regards, John Ralls _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
