standalone has plainly readable transcript

[Richard Gaskin]

Victor Eijkhout wrote:

>> I should have made the connection
> 
> Any time you say that, it really indicates a deficiency in the
> manual. As a manual writer myself, I don't approve of the "you can't
> say it wasn't there" style of technical writing.

Fortunately that doesn't seem to be the style Jeanne employs in documenting
Rev.

"Any time" may be a difficult position to support given the variety of posts
here about the more-extensive-than-Macromedia's documentation, some
evidencing a greater earnestness in trying than others.

As a documentation professional, surely you recognize the dynamic that
occurs once the meme of "the docs are inadequate" grows legs: an element of
"learned helplesness" creeps into the community, in which newcomers read
posts slamming the docs and begin to assume they needn't even try looking.

While specific constructive suggestions sent to Jeanne are invaluable in
providing guidance for further expansion, posts making broad negative
generalizations about the docs can be a disservice to the readers here,
misleading them to believe that finding the answers they need may be harder
than is actually the case.

This latest issue of password-protecting stacks is a good case in point. If
something seems obvious enough to get alarmed over, it may be obvious to the
RunRev team as well, and might well have already been addressed.  The same
amount of effort as required to post an alarming note to the list is all
that's required to recognize that in this case such a post isn't necessary:
Step 3 of 3 in the Distribution Builder has a field clearly labeled "Encrypt
with password" in the middle of the card.

And in the last several weeks a lot of posts have been searching for
language features in which what was being sought is the actual keyword they
were looking for; submitting the same term to the Transcript Dictionary as
was submitted to the list would have yielded immediate gratification.
Sometimes the problem is believing things can be as easy as they are. ;)