[texdoc] texdoc vntex

Adam R. Maxwell amaxwell at mac.com
Wed Mar 17 02:07:16 CET 2010


On Mar 16, 2010, at 4:08 PM, Karl Berry wrote:

> Off-topic for texdoc, but FYI anyway: Heiko has been looking for
> volunteers to do a substantial revision of the hyperref documentation
> "forever".  One person (Paul Norman) recently came forward, though any
> ETA on fruition is unknown.

That sounds like a big undertaking!

>    Do not ever rely on a developer's idea of documentation or software
>    usability :).
> 
> Based on what I've seen of Heiko's documentation of his own packages, I
> think he is well above average as a documentor (as well as an
> implementor, I'm sure we can all agree :).  Hyperref doc is a special
> case, which he inherited.

Absolutely; I didn't intend to demean Heiko's capabilities, especially since my own knowledge of TeX is trivial by almost any standard, and hyperref is way beyond me.  My comment was not intended personally, in spite of how it may have come across.  Sorry.

> I actually think there are a lot of developers who are also perfectly
> capable documentors and "users".  Of course there are plenty who are
> not, too :).

I do think it's common for developers to document the low-level details, since that's what's interesting and took a lot of time to implement; often the stuff that clueless users like me need to know is omitted, at least at first, because it seems obvious.  Most developers I know, myself included, are guilty of this at some point; I was always trying to get users to contribute to BibDesk documentation for that reason, or at least file bug reports so we could improve it.

-- 
Adam



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