Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!groucho!davis
From: davis@groucho.ucar.edu (Glenn P. Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Online Docs (Was: Next Bugs)
Keywords: WriteNow, Documentation
Message-ID: <4473@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 25 Sep 89 21:36:41 GMT
References: <2420@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> <6247@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@ncar.ucar.edu
Reply-To: davis@groucho.UCAR.EDU (Glenn P. Davis)
Organization: Unidata/UCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 41

I puruse the NeXT Documentation using WriteNow on the NeXT.

I find the situation less than desirable.  The reason is that the Online
docs are formatted to look nice when printed and WriteNow is WYSIWYG.
These two conditions conspire to mean that I can't read the document a page
at a time on the screen.

I personnally find scrolling the documents a line ("pressing") at a time
VERY tiring to the eyes.  
An alternative, 'Alt Scroll down", lands me in the page transition area
(no useful information) every other time since there is so much vertical
whitespace in the documents.
A third alternative, typing the next page number in the lower right 'page'
box, is clumsy. It also has the disadvantage of registering the  upper
edge of the "page" (paper edge) with the upper edge of the view. One
would prefer to register the upper margin line with the upper edge of
of the view.

What I would like to do is trim the window such that it just contains the
meaningfull content of the page, then (preferably with one keystroke or click),
display the next page with the same registration within the window as I had
set up.  Alternatively, just disable vertical page margins/ page breaks 
when reading, so that the doc is vertically continuous.
The goal is to read the document with a minimum of "screen refreshes".

Note that the traditional unix "nroff -man | more" system
actually gave you this.

Perhaps there are some WriteNow tricks I can use? Or maybe the interface
needs some changes. The current interface is OK for for writing/composing
docs, but is lousy for reading them.

Are there others who agree with this assessment or am I out in left field on
this?

Glenn P. Davis
UCAR / Unidata
PO Box 3000                   1685 38th St.
Boulder, CO 80307-3000        Boulder, CO  80301

(303) 497 8643