Re: User manual

[Ben Pfaff]

I agree with your criticisms.

I suspect that the tutorial would be more useful if it was not
oriented around using the command syntax interactively. I doubt that
is a common way to use PSPP. It seems to me that users are more likely
to use PSPP either by writing syntax files in an editor and running
them noninteractively, or by using the GUI (either writing syntax
files there or using the dialog boxes).

Would you be OK with it if I modified the tutorial to be oriented
around writing syntax files, rather than around writing syntax
interactively in the text UI?

I also have some ideas for improving the output in the manual. I'm
going to play with those ideas today. We'll see!

On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 1:00 AM John Darrington
<john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 11:11:16PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>      I pushed improvements to the tutorial so that its output is also
>      generated automatically at build time.
>
>
> Thanks for that.
>
> I am of the opinion that the user manual needs a major reorganisation.
> Some chapters need to be merged with others.   Some chapters need to be
> deleted altogether.    When it started, our manual was strictly a reference
> manual.  Then the tutorial chapter was added.   And now we have some tutorial
> material in the reference sections.    The sections to each chapter are sorted
> alphabetically, which IMO is not particularly useful and is unnecessary since
> we have an index.   The manual needs to be arranged in the order in which
> a reader is likely to need them.
>
>
> As far as example output is concerned, I would like find a better option than
> the "ascii" driver's output for the printed manual.  I have some ideas for
> an improvement, but only ideas at this stage.
>
> J'