Re: [gnuspeech-contact] {Spam?} Monet manual vs. gnustep Monet

[David Hill]

Hi Paul,

Sorry for the delay in responding. The end of April is not a good time for dealing with anything important other than Canadian income tax!!

On Apr 27, 2011, at 7:19 PM, Paul Tyson wrote:

What started as an attempt to correct a few HTML formatting issues in the Monet manual turned into a conversion of the manual to Docbook xml.

A task that is much appreciated.

I also took the opportunity to merge the separate documents for adding postures and rules into the main manual.  I created several thumbnail images that were missing from svn.  These are not the best quality, since I just scaled down the full-size images, and I am not a graphics expert.

One of the reasons I wanted to get the manual in shape is to help me study the gnustep Monet application, but right off I find discrepancies between the the manual and the application.  As I understand it: 1) the manual describes the NeXT version of the application; 2) several changes were made in porting to OS X; and 3) possibly other changes were made in the gnustep version.

My question is, can I take the existing gnustep Monet application as the desired state?

It would be best to treat the existing Mac OS X version as definitive, but the GNUStep version is supposed to be logically the same, although -- naturally -- the GNUStep version does not use the Aqua interface. Ultimately, a separate manual is required for each of GNUStep and Mac OS X, where the text should be pretty well the same, but the screen shots differ.

If so, I can modify the manual to match the current state of the application.

That would be a perfectly reasonable approach.

There are some windows that appear to be design improvements over the screenshots in the manual, but I don't want to assume anything without guidance from experts in the group.

Monet was improved during the port. The GNUStep version is the improved version.

In other words, would I go too far wrong by updating the manual to replace existing screenshots with new ones from the current gnustep Monet application (and updating the descriptions to match)?

You would be doing exactly the right thing.

I have no way of knowing how gnustep Monet diverges from the OS X version.  It would be possible to tag the variants in the manual, so that you could either produce platform-specific versions of the manual, or a combined version with the platform-specific differences identified.

As noted, apart from the screen shots, the Mac OS X version and GNUStep versions are supposed to be identical. The existing Monet manual uses screen shots taken directly from a NeXT and represent the original version which stays for the NeXT (anyone still running a NeXT apart from me :-), but is superseded for the ported versions where the operations are ordered and controlled in a slightly different, hopefully better, way.

There may be changes in the future, but the manual is designed to editable -- right?

HTH

david

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David Hill, Project Administrator

address@hidden

Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures  (Tao Te Ching #67)

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