davis@groucho.ucar.edu (Glenn P. Davis) (09/26/89)
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 8643fad@kulla (Franklin A Davis) (09/28/89)
In article <4473@ncar.ucar.edu> davis@groucho.UCAR.EDU (Glenn P. Davis) writes: >I puruse the NeXT Documentation using WriteNow on the NeXT. > >I find the situation less than desirable. >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. Absolutely! WriteNow desperately needs "next page" and "previous page" keys. --Franklin franklin a davis Thinking Machines Corp. Cambridge, MA 02142 617-876-1111 <fad@think.com> {ames, harvard, mit-eddie, uunet}!think!fad Let the four winds blow you safely home!
greid@adobe.com (Glenn Reid) (09/29/89)
In article <30216@news.Think.COM> fad@think.com (Franklin A Davis) writes: =In article <4473@ncar.ucar.edu> davis@groucho.UCAR.EDU (Glenn P. Davis) writes: ==I puruse the NeXT Documentation using WriteNow on the NeXT. == ==I find the situation less than desirable. ==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. = =Absolutely! WriteNow desperately needs "next page" and "previous =page" keys. As an interesting "solution" to this, try the Previewer. Just as an exercise, open the SysRefMan/04_Drawing.wn file with WriteNow, from the NextLibrary/Documentation directory. Once it's open, bring up the "print" dialog and hit "Preview". It's 64 pages long so it takes a little while to write out all the pages. The Previewer lets you see exactly one page at a time, and has forward- and backward-page keys. The type is a little smaller than in WriteNow, but you can zoom if you want to. It's actually quite speedy and a nice way to zip through the documentation. If you really like it, all you have to do is to go through all of the WriteNow documentation and print them to a file somewhere so you can browse them with the Previewer :-) Glenn Reid Adobe Systems