Future "Tutorial and User Guide" direction

[Chris Lyttle]

On Sat, 2003-08-02 at 17:56, Jon Lapham wrote:
> Speaking of the Help and Guide documents... can someone explain what is 
> the philosophy behind them?
> 
> My understanding of what "help" pages are is to explain what things 
> specifically do.  But, no discussions of "why" or "howto", and no 
> discussions of the big picture.
> 
> However, reading through the help, there is a lot of "guide-esque" text. 
>     For example, the "getting started" and a "customizing GnuCash" sections.

Well the reason for dividing the 2 docs came up mainly because of the
extensive discussion of concepts that used to appear in the help. This,
combined with the fact that most of the 'new' help document written by
Carol was more a tutorial and discussion of concepts than a 'how to hell
do I just setup my accounts so I can get going' lead me to reason that
it would be good to have 2 docs. There would be Carol's guide, which you
are mainly working on now, which would include all the depth of
discussion of concepts and a step by step tutorial so that a person
reading it would be able to use it to figure out _why_ to do things in a
certain way in GnuCash. Then there would be the 'help' document, which I
wrote largely from scratch and combined stuff from the old help that
seemed relevant. This was intended to basically tell people how to get
tasks done in GnuCash without too much dicussion of why. 'Getting
started' has just that aim, how to get going with GnuCash quickly with a
minimum of fuss and description. Obviously there is still, and will
continue to be for the future, a lot of room for adding and extending
both docs. I met my aim in Jan of covering the major functionality of
the help section, and I've been very happy with the approach you've
taken with the guide, Jon.

Hope this helps
Chris
-- 
RedHat Certified Engineer #807302549405490.
Checkpoint Certified Security Expert 2000 & NG
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