Question about documentation

[Seregil]

I was just wondering if the manuals are automatically updated every time a feature is added or changed.

I last tread the manuals a while ago and I am wondering if I should go back and revise them.

Thanks!

[MNBlockHead]

Some of the manuals were never finished in the first place. For example, the Tips & Tricks guide still has many "TBD" sections and is watermarked "Preliminary".

The new "Manage Names" features have not make it to the guides, so I doubt other features have made it in there.

As a more experienced user, I would rather they focus resources on fixing bugs and moving on down their development roadmap. For newer users, however, outdated help material can be confusing and detracts from the company's image. It just doesn't look professional.

In the past I've suggested using a Wiki and letting the community help with keeping these up to date. But that raises questions of the cost and time to host and manage the wiki, fight off vandals, etc.

Also, folks often do need offline access to help material.

What I think would make a lot of sense is put the manuals into Skydrive or Google Docs. Looking at the formatting Skydrive may make more sense. Google Docs is still better for allows larger groups to simultaneously edit, but you have to make sacrifices in formatting. I've use Skydrive to group-edit some very complicated and highly formatted Word Documents and it works very well, though it does have more of a learning curve if the participants are not MS Office savvy.

What I would recommend to LWD is identify a small group of long-time, highly supportive, and knowledgeable volunteers to update the documentation.

LWD can then easily save the updated Word Documents to PDF and put into RW.

I don't know how the manuals are currently updated. If they can only be updated with a software update, there is still likely gong to be lag between new features being released and manuals being updated. Still, it should be easy to add a link to the most current "draft" documents on the web, which you can still download.

[Vargr]

MNBlockHead:

Good idea. I for one wouldn't mind adding things to an online manual once in a while.

But someone has to be in charge, formulate a layout manual, make sure it is followed and read up on what is written in order to ensure consistency and correctness.

There is always a heck of a lot of work involved in such seemingly simple and "effort-free" solutions.

But as I said, if all that is solved, then I would gladly add bits and pieces now and then.

[Acenoid]

I guess the way to go is to write an "unofficial" guide. Maybe we can ask for permission to use the official documentation as baseline and then go from there.

[Viking2054]

Since Realm Works is still kind of a moving target as far as development and feature set go, doesn't it make this kind of thing an exercise in frustration? Some things might be stable and fixed, but for those things that change and change again forcing rewrite after rewrite could get annoying for those doing the documentation.

For things LWD says are fixed and stable features, I can see this as a great aid though.

[MintMMs]

I would go for a current list of the keyboard shortcuts somewhere. Something simple and easily updated.

[rob]

The documentation is (IMO) woefully out-of-date. There are a bunch of things that aren't fully covered that we've added over the past year, and there are some things that are completely missing. We've got a list of all the things that need to be added/updated, but updating the documentation is a time-consuming task, and that's time taken away from everything else we're working to get done.

Couple this with the fact that it seems very few users actually read the documentation, and pile on the fact that a great many more users are very vocal about their favorite missing feature, it sure feels like a losing proposition to invest the time updating the documentation right now. It's a very frustrating Catch-22 from my perspective, since I'd really like to get the documentation up to snuff, but the opportunity cost of assigning the task to someone is too great.

I think the proper approach would be to get away from the current documentation within Word files and switch to a web-based structure. Heck, my grand vision is to have the documentation for RW be managed as a realm within RW. However, there are a few nasty gotchas with that idea that have precluded us going down that path. Anyways, I think a web-based structure would provide easy access to everyone (albeit not offline), while also making it much easier to update things piecemeal. It would also make it readily possible to give update access to a few users who want to help out with the effort. Alas, there would be a hefty chunk of time required to switch gears at this point. So everything is kind of stuck in the mud until we get the content market and web-based player access into place.

If anyone wants to volunteer to take point on migrating what's already in place to a web-based structure that can be readily supplemented by the user community, please contact us about it.

[MNBlockHead]

I was thinking about using Realmworks topics/articles themselves for help, but quickly ruled that out as you can't have two realms open at the same time and changing that current limitation seems like it would be a fairly big development issue and a distraction from features users more strongly desire.

I would love to help migrate the user documentation to a Web-based structure. I'll send a separate e-mail to discuss.

[Vargr]

Would it be possible to make an HTML-based version that could also be downloaded (albeit you would then be stuck in what-ever version it was when downloaded), so that you could work completely off-line (in which case you probably would be unable to update RW itself, thus the problem of a stagnant manual at that point seems rather irrelevant).

Then, when you are on-line you could dl the latest version right after you updated RW to the latest version.

The off-line possibility is very important to me :-)