I'll volunteer to help...

[Bill Wohler]

lapham at extracta.com.br (Jon Lapham) writes:

> Take a look, I added your text, and rewrote some of the instructions
> so they actually. sortof, kinda, work now:
>
> http://www.jandr.org/temp/gnucashdocs/invest_stockprice1.html

I have some suggestions. See below.

> Bill, question for you.  I still have yet to get the online quotes to
> actually work.  In the price editor, the "source" for my stock quotes
> still says "user:price-editor".  I *think* this may be a symptom of
> whatever my problem is.  How do I change that?

Dunno. I simply clicked the Get Online Quotes in the Edit Account
dialog and set the source (e.g., Vanguard for my Vanguard accounts). 

Anyway, back to the manual.

The very first thing I would do is assume that Finance::Quote is
installed. Don't mention it in the main text of the manual at all (we
should probably change text in the Source field of the Price Editor
dialog so that it matches the text in the Edit Account dialog). This
is the part that made my eyes glaze over since James took care of all
of this on my Debian system so I don't even need to know that
Finance::Quote exists (thanks James!). Remember that yours is a
"Users" manual, not a "System Admin" manual.

Move:

  8.5.3.1. Installing Finance::Quote

to an appendix.

Then, in 

  8.5.3. Setting Stock Price Automatically

add a footnote which says:

  Obtaining price quotes depend on the Perl Finance::Quote module
  described in <a href="#appendixG">Appendix G</a>.

Then, you can remove the heading:

  8.5.3.2. Configuring Finance::Quote

And add a paragraph about clicking on the Get Online Quotes checkbox.

Then add two paragraphs that actually answer the question posed by the
section heading "Setting Stock Price Automatically". The first
paragraph talks about clicking on the Get Quotes button. The second
paragraph talks about using cron (and don't forget to mention that you
have ensure that gnucash is closed before it happens, and mention the
result that if you exit gnucash, the cronned updates will be
clobbered).

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler at newt.com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD
Maintainer of comp.mail.mh FAQ and MH-E. Vote Libertarian!
If you're passed on the right, you're in the wrong lane.