Documentation (was Re: standalone has plainly readable transcript, etc)

[Graham]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 22:11:52 -0600, Dar Scott <dsc at swcp.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, June 12, 2003, at 06:30 PM,
>revolution at knowledgeworks.plus.com wrote:
>
> > As Richard points out, the number of keyword tokens that have meaning
> > for the engine behind Revolution is quite phenomenal, and the
> > documentation is really quite exhaustive.
>
>I agree.  The task is huge and creating a way to address a huge amount
>of highly interrelated details is a challenge.  I think Jeanne has done
>a good job.

I guess we all agree. I am using the search features a great deal, and most 
of what I need comes up. If there is stuff missing now, it's more rounded 
essays on the what and why of whole concept areas - reports have been 
mentioned (lots of detail, but IMHO no overall description of the concept, 
its intended use and its limitations - but I will of course study this 
further following Jeanne's posts).

At present for me the most difficult is tables. I have progressed to 
discovering what a table is, kind of, but I still don't understand how to 
use one of these things, for example to create spreadsheet-like 
functionality, where every cell generates a checking action and also in 
principle some kind of scripting (to evaluate a formula for example). The 
answer could be "don't try it - that's not what tables are for", but I 
didn't find a scripter-level explanation that could have told me even this. 
I got such confusing messages from previous posts on this that I gave up. I 
never even found out what happened when I specified a cell as a date and 
then put a floating point number into it instead (how would the scripter 
know this had happened?)

Of course I do not think this invalidates the huge and admirable work done 
on the RunRev documentation, but it does mean that there is always room for 
more clarification. If I ever find the brains and the time to work on 
tables, I'd be happy to write the essay myself...

BTW, when I search for "table" using the plug-in, I get words like 
"suitable" and "editable" included. How do I specify the use of the entire 
word "table", however delimited? I must have missed the answer to this.

TIA

Graham



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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France