Re: A shorter manual

[Matti De Craene <mattidecraene@gmail.com>]

> - 2.8 Drawers
> - 3.2 Column width and alignment
> - 3.3 The Spreadsheet (4 rather technical pages)
> - 7.4 Property Inheritance and 7.5 Column View
>  (do beginners really need properties at all ??)


I would agree on this list (except maybe drawers).

If there is room for additional sections maybe:
- include the org ref card as an appendix (which in itself offers a
very good overview of org)
- include some pointers into getting emacs for different OSes and
getting started with emacs. If there would be an O´Reilly book on
Org-mode this would be in the first chapter or so. For people who
started using emacs because of org (like me) the current Introduction
might still be too cryptic (?)


--

Matti




On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Dan Davison <davison@stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> Erik Iverson <eriki@ccbr.umn.edu> writes:
>
>> Carsten Dominik wrote:
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> with the Org-mode manual moving toward 200 pages,  I am
>>> starting to worry that people with stop in their tracks
>>> when considering Org-mode, just because of the sheer size
>>> of the manual.
>>>
>>> So I did a little experiment.  I took the manual and stripped
>>> everything which could be considered advanced material, but
>>> keeping all features and all basic commands and customizations.
>>>
>>> What remains are about 50 pages.  A document with the same
>>> structure (even the same chapter numbers) as the manual.
>>> I am wondering if it would be useful to have this as a beginners
>>> document - or if the existence of this document would lead
>>> to more confusion than relief.
>>>
>>>     http://orgmode.org/orgguide.pdf
>>>
>>> I don't see this a an alternative for the manual - just
>>> as an additional, rather static document, with little need for
>>> updates.  The manual would continue to be the comprehensive
>>> and constantly updated document.
>>>
>>> Comments are welcome.
>
> Hi Carsten,
>
> I think this would be a good thing to have.
>
> It would be good to have active HTML links to the relevant main manual
> sections in PDF and HTML versions. (even if this is not encouraged by
> texinfo format).
>
> I'm tempted to suggest going even a little further than you have done.
> If you were to make it shorter, I would suggest removing the following
> sections, and to replace removed sections with very short non-technical
> advertisements for features that are covered in the main manual.
>
> - 2.8 Drawers
> - 3.2 Column width and alignment
> - 3.3 The Spreadsheet (4 rather technical pages)
> - 7.4 Property Inheritance and 7.5 Column View
>  (do beginners really need properties at all ??)
>
> Dan
>
>>
>> I think it's a great idea.  The R project has something called "An
>> Introduction to R" for beginners, separate from the complete manual.
>> I think that as a beginner, and wondering how to break into learning a
>> new package, that "reading the manual" has certain negative
>> psychological connotations that "reading the intro document" does not,
>> not the least of which is the length of full manual.
>>
>> And since knowing just the basics of org can be immensely beneficial,
>> I think it's even more reason to have a basic intro document.
>>
>> --Erik
>>
>>
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