On Saturday 03 November 2001 18:30, John Levon wrote: Hi John,
You chopped off a major part that I was responding to: John Levon said: >>> I would hope that the Qt2 dialogs are intuitive enough to not need >>> documentation. Remeber the dialogs have the same responsibilities, so if >>> there is e.g. a boolean flag, it will be in both dialogs. I wasn't just responding to the boolean flag portion, but also the 'intuitive' and 'responsibilities' portions as well. Hopefully you'll see why in my response below... > On Sat, Nov 03, 2001 at 03:48:29PM -0500, George De Bruin wrote: > > > there is e.g. a boolean flag, it will be in both dialogs. > > > > One of the problems with this is that we aren't documenting to the coding > > of the dialogs. We are documenting to the visual aspects, and the > > individual functionalities of the dialogs (and for that matter, the > > menus). So, when the layout and arrangement of them changes, even if > > they are minimal and/or intuitive, the documentation must reflect it. > > Yes, this amounts to hand-holding, IMO. However, this also one of the > > reasons why there is a huge market for aftermarket books: to hand hold > > the user through the user interface of a program. > > I wasn't talking about code anyway: if there is an on/off switch, it will > be in all the dialogs. But yes, where the lyx docs team do need to mention > specifics in dialogs is going to be a problem... I guess where my concern was going wasn't so much that the toggle setting type of thing, but other controls. Let me give an example from the current cvs (one that we will have to deal with...): The Document Layout dialog, the Paper tab. This went through a significant, and much needed clean up (YEAH!), however with the changes to the layout and way the dialog is put together, there will be significant changes to the documentation. Why? Well, now we have drop down lists to specify the dimensions, instead of typing them in the input portion of the dialog. And, the grouping of the items changed. (And, there is now an added toggle over 1.1.6fix3 - but we'll assume that exists in the QT version...:) If, under other toolkits, this dialog is layed out differently, groupings change, or some of the features work differently (say, the margin boxes use spin boxes in addition to straight input boxes), this will have a significant impact on the documentation. Now, I do see it from the other side too: if we have better controls we should use them (especially if they make the overall use of LyX better / easier). It just leaves us with a situation that is, well, sticky... Hopefully this clarifies what I was talking about. It's just something that we'll have to keep in mind for when we get to the other UI's. // George ASIDE: Mike - in just thinking about this a little bit further, maybe it would help if we started to put together some kind of a document that covers the common controls for each of the toolkits after 1.2.0 is released. This way, if we have something like this around, it may help us in the future as either (a) something we can add to the documentation as it's own section or separate document, and/or (b) something that the doc team can use as a cut-n-paste source for revising the documentation.
