Re: Why is it _still_ so freaking hard to get info with images?

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 8:50 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

> It is a bit disappointing since the info documentation with images is
> essential for really getting moving smoothly with Lilypond, and the
> procedure for producing them is so broken or obfuscate that none, I
> repeat none of _any_ lilypond precompilated versions that I know of
> carries them, and there is no way even a clever user could be expected
> to arrive at usable docs.

At the risk of putting more gasoline on the fire: I have never found
the info docs anything of a priority, not when Jan started it (back in
2003 or whenever it was) and it was always Jan who had to fix build
errors in the process.  Given that nobody (besides you) else ever
complained about the info pages leads me to believe that in reality
very few people care about info pages with images.

There are other data that support this too:

in March, we had 1689 windows downloads, 122 mac, and 107 linux ones
on lilypond.org.  The latter number may be skewed because some people
will get lilypond through their distributor, but still.  I believe
that the average windows user does not know what info is, and much
less has a viewer for it.

Speaking from personal experience, I tend to access documentation for
whatever I do by searching Google.  I suspect this holds for many more
people.

> It is my opinion that Lilypond developers are shooting themselves quite
> unnecessarily in the foot by the large discrepancy between the high
> quality of the documentation and the probability of actually getting to
> see it after a finite amount of effort.

I think the lilypond doc developers are focusing on getting excellent
HTML documentation, and I think that is a smart use of resources.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen