On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 09:12:02PM -0400, Amir Karger wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I don't have the energy to respond to each piece of the message. Basically,
> though, it's a neat idea but I really don't know if it'll work in practice.
[snip!]
Okay, I like many of the ideas I see flying around here. I also like
the motivation: Make it easy for the user to climb that learning
curve. That was precisely my goal when I did the first LyXDoc
rewrite. There was also some of your proposed parallelism between the
Tutorial and the UG. There is, however, a degree of repetition of
content between these two docs. That's one thing you'll need to be
sure to avoid.
While I'm talking about unnecessary repetition, this is exactly why
"Intro" was born. I was copying and pasting the exact same opening
chapter into all 6 docs, then having to make changes in 6 places
everytime I needed to do maintenance.
Naturally, one should avoid content repetition whenever possible.
I do think that you may be able to pull off this parallelism, at least
to some degree. I suggest that you start with an outline for each doc
(new or existing) and propose this. We can then send it through a
couple of rounds of peer review. If we can then use the new structure
with only cut-n-paste and a minimal bit of rewrite (to keep the flow of
the text smooth), then just go for it. If the new structure requires
greater effort to implement, then we should think more carefully about
what to do next at that point in time.
--
John Weiss
"Not through coercion. Not by force. But by compassion. By
affection. And, a small fish." -His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama
