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Subject:Re: Doc Design and Conventions From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:57:45 -0700
I'd find that more useful as a PDF, so I could search for the command I want.
I regularly encounter documentation that does a pretty good job of
telling me what I could figure out for myself, if I COULD FIND WHERE
IN THE MENU SYSTEM THEY BURIED THE DAMN COMMAND.
For example, a couple of years ago I used a program called Document!X,
a tool that generated an API reference for a COM ActiveX library by
extracting information from a TLB file (part of the application) and
incorporating comments, sample code, links, etc. maintained
separately. It was very slick at what it did, but I had to contact
tech support to find several of the most basic commands, and had to
write in-house documentation filling in the blanks in the doc.
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:
> The last software user documentation I did was a menu tree on a plastic-coated
> card that listed the parameters on the dialogs each dropdown opened, plus all
> the "bubble help" blurbs the programmers inserted into the program. The API doc
> was probably 50X the size of the user docs.
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