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