[O] Re: orgmode manual improvement suggestion.

[Izzie]

Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos <at> hp.com> writes:

> If you download an org distribution (through git or a tar file or what
> have you), you should be able to find the doc/org.texi file which is
> used to generate the manual.

Found it. In debian it's gzipped and located in /usr/share/doc/org-mode/ where 
I found both org.texi.gz and orgguide.texi.gz

I was hoping org mode documentation had been made with org mode, I wasn't 
expecting a texi file format I had not been introduced to yet. I can use it to 
generate the manual, but I can't jump into modifying the source.
 
> The following page
> 
>    http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Output-
Formats.html#Output-Formats
> 
> describes briefly how to produce each output format from the texi file.

Thanks. how come this is not part of the manual ? It is a good practice to 
provide information about where to find the manual and how to produce a 
specific format (especially when not providing it).
 
> > And that the single page version of "the compact Org-mode Guide" is
> > missing.
> 
> But I don't know whether the single page document ever was (or should
> be) available from the orgmode site, so I'm not sure I'd characterize is
> as "missing": Matt and/or Jason would know better.

It's actually available as a pdf download but this is not what I expected (a 
single html page) so I deemed it "missing". I usually expect to find both 
single page html and one page per section html versions along with gzipped 
versions (for those who want to download it).

IMHO the current "Documentation" section found at http://orgmode.org/ could use 
a quick rewrite. It might be related to english not being my native language 
but when I read "read the online manual" I understand that there is a different 
offline version. Rewritten to "read the manual online" this potential confusion 
is no more (at least for me).

There's also a lack of consistency, for the guide it says:
* Read the online compact guide or download it as a PDF document. (...)

while for the manual the same info is broken into two different sections:

* Read the online manual. (...)
* Download the manual as a 200-page PDF document.

Starting the entries with "Read", "Download", "Buy" helps scanning through the 
section by providing info right away, out of luck the specific version i was 
looking for is the one which doesn't follow this pattern:

* You can also have the entire manual in a single monolithic file.

I had the online manual open which offers no easily found way to get to the 
place where other versions of the manual can be found, so I headed for the 
orgmode website, scanned the documentation section and missed the single html 
page version I was looking for, because it breaks the pattern. As I am 
expecting this version to be found I read the whole section from the beginning 
and missed it again, for some reason "single monolithic page" didn't fire up my 
brain looking for a "single html page", At this point I still assume the single 
html page version exists and can be found in this section so I started again 
from the top and clicked each link one after the other until I finally found it.

Leading to this improvement suggestion thread.