Re: [Audacity-devel] Help Formats (was Provide 'Unrecognised Audio File Format' dialog with help-link button)

[Gale A. <ga...@au...>]

    | From Richard Ash <ri...@au...> 
    | Sat, 01 Sep 2007 17:55:21 +0100
    | Subject: [Audacity-devel] Help Formats (was Provide 'Unrecognised 
    | Audio File Format' dialog with help-link button)
    | On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 01:46 +0100, Martyn Shaw wrote:
    | > It's not that I hate pdfs, if I want to print something out, such as a 
    | > service manual for the washing machine, then they are fine.  But on 
    | > screen?  At 1024x768?  A4 paper must be about 3000xsomething or more. 
    | > Appropriate means for the medium, I say, and people using Audacity are 
    | > on a computer of some sort aren't they?
    | 
    | The problem with this approach was two-fold. Firstly, you had to write
    | the manual as HTML, so it was a pain to update (it wasn't very WYSWYG
    | friendly, and the output of most WYSWYG applications wouldn't convert to
    | PDF properly). Secondly, the formatting of the PDF (made from it)
    | often didn't match the formatting of the HTML, because the converter
    | had lousy style support and ignored most of the formatting.
    | 
    | These were the main reasons for moving the manual onto the wiki at 
    |   http://www.audacityteam.org/manual/index.php?title=Main_Page
    | 
    | This makes editing easier (because you don't need to mess with HTML),
    | and it outputs nice, reasonably standards compliant XHTML on the
    | Internet. There is an interface for adding exporters to mediawiki, so
    | the idea (mostly Dominic's) was to use this interface to export other
    | formats we wanted the documentation in, mainly (at that point) PDF.
    |
    | The wxHTML viewer gives us another set of problems, because it doesn't
    | support XHTML. It doesn't even do all the things in HTML 4.0, but
    | basically does the cut-down feature set of the Microsoft HTML help
    | browser. This is a pain, because it doesn't (as far as I know) include
    | any style support. So creating content for it is messy and non-standard.
    | This is where the drive to not use the program internal help came from -
    | creating it was a right pain because it won't take content intended for
    | modern web browsers.

This is all understood and I think we have to accept that if we were to 
continue with internal help it would not change between versions, that more 
up to date help would be on a PDF, and that PDF would be the preferred way
to disseminate help. On the other hand the old inbuilt help never updated 
between versions anyway. The majority of the users (i.e. on Windows) 
probably find it odd we don't use CHM without realising the reason is that
is specific to Windows. Isn't CHM being phased out now with Vista anyway? 

I don't have "too" much problem having no inbuilt help, with a single page 
online HTML version infrequently updated for those who have problems 
with PDF (for reasons of accessibility or otherwise). Obviously those with
poor internet connections, or none on the computer they are using Audacity
on, will see this as a regression. Also the majority of quality Windows 
programs in my experience do have inbuilt Help, so the user expectation is 
there (I don't know if Linux and Mac users have this expectation or not).


Gale   



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