Some requests for changes to documentation of Help Manual.

Geert Janssens geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
Fri Oct 30 05:54:11 EDT 2015


Hi David,

Thanks for all your feedback. I'll comment in between.

On Thursday 29 October 2015 12:35:45 David Carlson wrote:
> 1.  The English version of the Help manual Table 4.7 calls the sixth
> button "General Journal". In the English version of the actual
> program it is "General Ledger".  I recall that there was some reason
> for using one of those names instead of the other, but the reason
> escapes me at the moment. Whichever is incorrect should be fixed.
> 
Agreed and fixed for the next release. For some reason I had missed a couple of references to 
the old name.

> 2. The "Account Register/General Journal" section should have some
> differentiation described for General Journal,  "with sub-accounts"
> views and for security account register views where running balances
> have different meanings and different columns may appear.
> 
Looks like a fair enhancement request, so please file it.

> 3.  The "General Journal" section accessed from Table 4.7 but hanging
> at the end of the "Common Transaction Operations" section should be
> moved to the Account Register/General Journal" section and be
> elaborated to indicate that it is a special window and that the Tools
> and Assistants > Find dialog search types work differently in that
> window. Once a Find has been done in the "General Ledger" window, to
> return to the previously selected (and saved?) filter settings for
> that window one would either need to open a new General Ledger window
> or search for an all-inclusive criterion such as description not =
> regex "" with the search type "add results to current search"
> selected.

Again reasonable. As "all-inclusive criterion I'd suggest
Description contains regex "."
But the net result is the same (the latter makes more sense to my logic mind).

> 
> 4.  The first Tools and Assistants > Find Dialog description of the
> type of search, which is for 'normal' searches should be identified
> as 'normal' and not for business searches.

I don't understand what you are trying to convey here. Is the current text alluding to you the 
search is for business searches ?
How would you phrase it to be more clear to you ?

> Then the behavior
> description should be corrected as follows:  The first paragraph
> should indicate that depending on where the search was started from,
> the first or second type of search is pre-selected as the search
> type, but any of the four may be selected.  Then after the Find
> button is pressed, the results may appear in a new window or in the
> same window, depending on certain conditions.  If the search has been
> initiated from the Accounts window or an account register window and
> the first or second choice of type is selected, the results will
> appear in a new results window.  If the search is initiated from an
> account register but type button "add" or "delete" is selected, the
> search results opens in a new window but it covers all transaction
> splits, not just the transaction splits containing that account
> register.

Those are important inconsistencies in our code if you ask me and should probably be 
addressed more fundamentally at some point. I'm fine with documenting them first, so feel 
free to report it as both a code bug and a documentation update request.

> If the search has been initiated from a General Ledger (General
> Journal?) window or from a results window of a previous search, the
> same window is used.
> 

Falls in the same inconsistency category.

> The type "Refine" must have some significance, but I failed to figure
> that out.

"Refine" means you take the search results as they are and perform another search on it to 
restrict the results even further.

I'll admit I never used the Add/Delete search types, so I'm unaware of how exactly they are 
supposed to work.

Regards,

Geert


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