jonathon wrote:
Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
but very few people write tutorials for more complex user tasks or giving specific usage examples (so much in OOo is easy but not obvious).
Throwing my two cents in here.
Writing tutorials for "complex" user tasks is non-trivial.
Two immediate things that would be author has to face are:
* Time it takes to write the tutorial;
* Number of people that will use the tutorial;
Two examples:
_Stylist: The Functions and their Attributes_.
There are 11 different types of artefacts that have styles associated
with them. Collectively, there are roughly 100 different functions for
those styles. The offered attributes, and their behaviour, depends upon
whether or not "Complex Language Support", and/or CJKV support is
enabled, or disabled. The macros that one has installed, can also
affect the behaviour of the styles.
Is spending the 200 or so hours it takes to write it, justified by the
size of the potential user population?
_OOo in a Multi-Lingual Environment_
I don't remember how long it took me to write the versions that were
publicly available. What I do know, is that I never received any
feedback about it. I had long since decided that providing public
updates was a losing proposition. I'd document things, as I needed
solutions, and leave it at that. It wasn't until February of this year
--- or roughly four years after it was removed from the OOoAuthor's
site, that it looked like some sections of it, might be useful for other
people. Is spending even 100 hours to update a document that maybe ten
others will use, worthwhile? Only if the point is to outdo Daniel's &
Bright, in the number of writing systems in a single book, that were
generated by computer.
Tutorials (or how-to's) need not, and IMO should not, attempt to cover
everything about a topic. They are not, or should not be, reference works.
The best tutorials IMO are those that explain how to do a specific user task,
especially those tasks that involve several functions in OOo. For example,
setting up heading styles, assigning outline levels, and then compiling a TOC.
Many tutorials/how-to's can be put together relatively quickly from existing
material in the user guides. Others, of course, would need more work than that.
Whether it's worth someone's time to do a specific tutorial/how-to is up to
them. The ones I have in mind would be useful to a wide audience.
--Jean
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