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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: users book about KOffice
From:       "Raphael Langerhorst" <raphael-langerhorst () gmx ! at>
Date:       2004-01-30 17:03:41
Message-ID: 4567.1075482221 () www25 ! gmx ! net
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> On Friday 30 January 2004 16:05, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:
> > I've been watching the discussion and wondering when this would come
> > up.  The justification for doing this rather than enhancing the online
> > documentation is?
> >
> 
> A good point, I totally agree with you that the parts of the book covering
> the 
> individual apps can just as well be added to the online help, there are
> only 
> a few differences for me:
> 
> Motivation for writing a book would be:
> * you can put more background knowledge/... in it wheras the online help 
> should be straight forward
> * you can build on top of previous chapters in the book, like "a guided
> tour 
> through KOffice" wheras the online help should be understandable when you 
> only read that very bit of it you need (IMHO).

sorry, forgot about that one:
* people that read the online doc already have KOffice installed... which
means that they at least consider using it as an office suite (or their distro
installed it by default). With a book you normally can reach people that are
"evaluating" things before they use it. And I think the time where many
people blindly use MS Office is more and more past, There are more than 5 books on
OOo in German language alone for example. My feeling is that people a)
should have the possibiltiy to evaluate their software and b) that people that
truly evaluate software are often first searching for a book about it.

> 
> 
> But I fully agree with you that actually the online help should be
> improved 
> rather than writing a full book.

but this statement still holds for sure. What about this timeline:

first...
* improving/completing the online help
then...
* writing the book which can partly be derived/based on the online help

I think with the roadmap(?) we have for KOffice we have enough time for
both: online help and a book, provided that there are enough people working on
these. I think documentation is important, although less than 10% are actually
using it... but I myself just bought a book about OpenOffice.org (and didn't
want to read the online help because I prefer reading a "real" book, although
the online help of OpenOffice.org is surely very good(?)).

Online help IMO is important while working with the application (yes, I
sometimes read a few things up in OOo's online help) while a book is important
for getting to know the application.


And, another reason for writing a book would be:
* KOffice has more potential because it builds on very good ground (QT/KDE)
whereas OOo has nothing they can build upon (=much more source code = harder
to handle = redundant work). So in the long run KOffice will be the better
application - and a book would make good PR. But I must really say that I'm sad
about the fact that there need to be multiple OSS office suites, but maybe
this is needed because of diverse(?) interest of people...

greetings,
Raphael

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