Recommended Change to Author LIsting in Documentation

[John Ralls]

> On Dec 15, 2016, at 5:38 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 15, 2016, at 9:18 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>> 
>> David,
>> 
>> Do you think making the support page "Preface" material--so that it comes either just before or just after "About the Author" might make it more prominent?
>> 
>> As for the copyright stuff, yeah, it gets pretty involved. I know a bit about it only becaus
> 
> John,
> 
> The About the Author page, when rendered in print, appears after the table of contents (all 8 pages of it). When rendered online, it gets buried in “About this document”. 
> 
> Neither of these solutions is all that likely to be seen by the panicked new user who needs a desperate question answered quickly. However, I see that there are numerous spots both online and in the docs that point people to the lists, so it is clear that those who have made these misguided cries for help have done so despite the many recommendations to the contrary. Given all that, perhaps it is enough to have removed the email addresses for the doc contributors. Without those prominent points of contact, users will (one hopes) avail themselves of the lists, as instructed on the main gnucash.org  page, and in the Guide. 
> 
> I am open to other ideas…

David,

You're right about it being after the TOC in a PDF/e-book, but in html "About the Author" is the second link in the index page after "About this Document" and the "Next>>>" link in the upper right-hand corner skips "About this Document" and goes straight to "About the Author". Changing either of those requires changing the XSL stylesheets that compose the DocBook markup into documents and there isn't time for me to learn that before this weekend's release.

Since I still get Google search results that point to the 2.4 version of the manual I suppose I should back-port the changes there.

OTOH, none of this is going to have any impact on the users who push F1 on an older release because they'll get the version of the docs that corresponds to the version of GnuCash they have installed, complete with all of the emails on the title page.

Regards,
John Ralls