On Fri, 25 Oct 2013 08:50:47 -0700 (PDT)
"Edward K. Ream" <[email protected]> wrote:

> http://leoeditor.com/tutorial-rst3.html
> 
> This was not easy.  All suggestions welcome.
> 
> Edward

Hi Ed,

My suggestions would depend on your intended audience. In this email,
I'll assume your intended audience is any computer literate person, as
that's the audience you were talking of evangelizing to in an earlier
thread. And, of course, I'm a member of that audience --- I know
something about computers, but little of Leo.

I bogged down after about 1/10 of the tutorial because I couldn't find
the created rST, but here's what I found so far:

You wrote: "This creates an rST chapter title. Use only the “#”
character, as shown."

Given that two lines did, but one line didn't, use # characters, I
found that confusing. I'd probably phrase it as "Put a line of several
pound signs above the text title (War and Peace), and an identical line
of pound signs below."

Yeah, that's wordy, but when I write instructional stuff, my priority,
by an order of magnitude, is clarity, and if I have to be redundant, or
boring, or use bad English, or whatever, in order to be clear, that's
just what I do (much to the consternation of the Sams Publishing
editors when I wrote Samba Unleashed).

You wrote:
    1 Create a new outline node, as some descendant of the @rst node.
    2 The node’s headline becomes the section’s title.
    3 Type the contents of the section in the body text of the node.

On #3, don't just call something "the node", because everything's a
node. Call it the @rst node.

On #1, for later reference, suggest a title for the new, descendant
node. This makes things understandable, and also facilitates cut and
paste.

You wrote: "The rst3 command generates rST underlining automatically."

Where does it put it? I couldn't find it, in my home directory or in
my .leo/db directory. Also, I had a panic moment when I wondered what I
needed to install in order to get a Linux rst3 command. I'd add the
clause ", available from Leo's cmds submenu, " right after the word
"command". I know these things seem obvious, but they're not at all
obvious to someone who knows neither the subject matter nor the context.

I stopped at this point, because without seeing the generated rST, I
didn't see the point.

Ed, as a generality, when I write a tutorial, I start by making no
assumptions about the reader's knowledge, except for the fact that he
or she is computer literate and smart. I aggressively look for and
eliminate anything that is unclear or could be misconstrued. I name
things, even to the point of boring repetition, and almost never use
words like "it" or "the node". What I'm trying to do is give the reader
a path to follow, and make it so the path has absolutely no branches or
intersections requiring a choice, so the reader can be free to observe
what's going on around him or her and not worry about missing a turn.

Of course, the assumption is, later the reader will come back and make
some branches, but by that time he knows the path like the back of his
hand.

By the way, where CAN I find the created rST?

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance

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