Re: repost screen dumps in books

["Brierley, Sean" <Brierley -at- QUODATA -dot- COM>]

>>>From what you say, you seem to not be doing screen dumps but
>>>just to put
>>>text in courier and shaded so that the user knows it's a screen.

Yes. Except, no shading. Just reproduce the screen text exactly as it
appears on the dumb dumb terminal.

>>>Have you thought instead of mimicking the screen in width,
>>>line wrapping, etc., to have a standard size of graphic behind your text
>>>box? A graphic that looks like a screen.

>>>"Programming does not want screen shots. I offered this.
>>>*    Graphics here are symbolic - they graphically indicate
>>>to the user
>>>it's what he/she sees on-screen

A convention in the book is that items in bold are typed by the user. I
suggested that I include such a statement in the book. Programming
declined. However, the same readers that are clever enough to figure out
that they should type bolded text are not clever enough to understand
that the printed text they are looking at is the same as the screen they
are viewing, because on the printed page some lines wrap differently
than they do on-screen.

>>>*    Ask the person - what's the point of this screen dump?

Apparently, the point is that without an exact duplicate of the screen,
the user gets confused and the directions are unusable. I explained, to
no avail, that I gave the user more credit than that.

>>>*    Show the person what other companies are doing with
>>>similar systems

I am loathe to do that. I will make my point based on my experience,
research, education, training, and reason. But I cannot support the idea
that something is only correct if someone else is doing it. I worked for
a company, once, that took the opinion that if we did something, and the
competition was doing it another way, then we must be doing things
wrong. At that company, I found the only way to get my way, and
credibility, was to show an example of a competitor doing things the way
I wanted. Actually, this was quite easy because my previous job had been
for a competitor ;?).

>>>*    Hope this helps,
>>>*
>>>*    Carla.

Thanks.

Sean

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