Several messages in the past about Powerpro Help have been addressed to me as well as to Bruce so I'd better explain:
I am not involved in Help in an continuous way. I just did one major job on it for Release 4.1. Since then Bruce has made additions and changes to it independently. I think that is because it is much easier and quicker for Bruce to do it that way. Doing it as team work for each beta would cause delays and be difficult to manage. I think it would be a good idea for me to do another job on Help sometime. In particular, I would like to integrate the documentation of the plugins (only Bruce's plugins which are distributed with PowerPro because I forsee several problems trying to include the non-Bruce plugins and keep them up to date). Also I would like to integrate the new pages which Bruce has added to Help in recent betas, so they appear in Help's Contents and have formatting which is consistent with the rest of help. ______________________________________________________ pi wrote: > maybe now its a good time to switch to a web based > system. (...) > what i really miss is a website with all the ppro > information like changelog, examples from you. tempuser wrote: t> I agree and ones I have think about something like a Wikipedia, t> where docs can be changed instantly by users. <snip> Oh dear, not again! Look back through the archives and read the many discussions about different formats for Help. Regarding a Wikipedia and other kinds of web based Help, I think people will always need and expect an installed Help which does not require an internet connection. Some people have slow or unreliable or expensive dialup services. It would be a major hassle for users with teenage children to get the kids off the telephone every time they want to look up the syntax for a command. ______________________________________________________ Regarding the distributed Help: Some prefer .hlp, some prefer .chm, some want .pdf, or html, some think Help should be in an Excel spreadsheet, etc, etc. Discussions always provide plenty of demands about which format should be provided - but no volunteers to actually make and maintain them all. IMHO it would be better to only provide one Help - only .hlp or only .chm but not both. Of course, a competent person can read either of those and it is unreasonable to expect Help to be distributed in several formats. By attempting to provide both, they will eventually become different from each other (someone recently pointed out some inconsistencies between the latest .hlp and .chm). Translating between the two is difficult. The result has been that the .chm is not as well made as the .hlp and not up to a quality good enough to distribute. As a reader of Help, I find the differences between .hlp and .chm are very minor and I would be willing to read either. As a writer, I have found the technical differences much greater. I think the choice of format should primarily consider what is easiest for the author - if he can make a good .hlp and a mediocre .chm then I'd rather read his .hlp. On the other hand if another author is good at making .pdf, but can only produce a messy .hlp, then I'd prefer that he supply only a .pdf document, (even though .pdf is not my personal favorite). ___________________________________________________________ > I agree and ones I have think about something like a Wikipedia, > where docs can be changed instantly by users. <snip> We need a Help which cannot be changed by users. It will always be essential to have an "official" Help, included in the distribution, which is only by Bruce and is basically the reference to the syntax and usage of all commands, functions, etc. If it is in addition, not instead of Help, a web based document which users can contribute to might be used by a few people. A wiki has been tried - a few people expressed enthusiasm initially but in fact it was not used much. If somebody attempts to revive that idea, it is possible that it will be used for a short while by six people. If you mean that you are going to create and maintain a wikipedia yourself, that's fine. That is a lot of work you are volunteering for. If you mean that somebody else should create one for you, I disagree. Attention: PowerPro's Web site has moved: http://www.ppro.org Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/power-pro/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
