Re: [StrongED] StrongED Instructions

[Steve Drain <steve@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Rickman wrote:> Fred and I have been considering the instructions.
He suggests we
> throw the matter open to listers.


It is a perennial problem for which many programmers have provided their

own solutions from very early on. StrongHelp (SH) is a survivor and it

is my own choice.


> StrongHelp has problems - many (including me!) don't like it. SH 
> manuals also rarely have proper indexes or contents pages. So it is 
> difficult to know what is there so pages get missed.

SH comes with a contents utility that the writer can employ, but failing
that any user can do it themselves. ;-) I have my own index program and
my manuals all have an index/contents, as well as a page list, usually
hidden though.

Gavin Wraith wrote:
> I have found StrongHelp flakey at times. Also insufficient control 
> over formatting. Why no right margins?

Formatting is a problem. I do not like the built-in algorithm for
determining page size and line length, so I subvert it to produce
uniform pages with line lengths good for reading. I have no solution for
the right margin, though.

> Richard Torrens wrote:
> > So we're left with plain text. Not ideal, I think.
> We'd great search facilities, could make good use of folding, and 
> with a bit of code and some minimal tagging could convert to html 
> when required

A good while ago I wrote my own 'Document' mode for this purpose and
Fred has included as one of the modes since. It does two levels of
folding with some elementary paragraph tags set by an initial character.
Folds and tags are coloured.

> > I have more ideas - but it's open for discussion. Suggestions 
> > please.
There are also 'Document Generation Systems'. I know of, but have
not used, Steve Fryatt's 'Man' and Rik Griffin's 'MakeHelp'. I think
they both use help comments within the source to generate manuals. these
might be in Text, HTML or SH form.

There have been StrongHelp<>HTML translators, but I am not sure any that
are currents. I have written my own SH to HTML converter, but that is
very much oriented to my own style of using SH and could not be used
universally.

One option I have tried is to write a manual using EasiWriter, which is
highly structured. This can output HTML and PDF as well as many other
formats.

> > And would anyone be prepared to help writing it?
Just after StrongED was made public, and before Fred had fully adopted
it, I tried to document it using SH and to categorise its facilities.
That was tricky. I have never attempted to produce a user manual as
Richard has and recognise it is a very large task. I did write two
articles for Archive magazine on Search and Replace, but those will be
out of date now.



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