Re: "Reference Dump" rant

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Hi Lawrence,

glad you like org-mode. I also think it is a great tool.

One of the great things about org-mode is that it is used by a very wide
range of people. I know of a couple of people who are not at all
technical who use org-mode just for general organisation and writing. It
certainly isn't something just for the 'Sheldons'.

If you believe there are some areas of the org documentation which needs
to be improved or augmented, I would strongly encourage you to
contribute. One of the bigger challenges faced by community efforts like
org-mode is documentation. Often, those who write and develop the
solution are too close to it to write clear and comprehensive
documentation. It needs contributions from users like yourself who don't
have the low level knowledge which can blind you to higher level
usability issues. As you will see from this list, documentation fixes
and contributions are not uncommon and are certainly welcomed - in fact,
that is one of the nice things about org-mode, the extent to which
community contributions are accepted.

regards,

Tim

Lawrence Bottorff <borgauf@gmail.com> writes:

> As many might gather from seeing so many of my beginner posts, I'm not
> exactly a Sheldon Cooper type, i.e., someone who has the A-ha! angel
> standing by 24/7 with her hand on his shoulder. So today I thought I'd
> upgrade my knowledge of org-mode tables. So I go to the section of the
> "manual" on tables. Experimenting on the commands, I get this fairly
> quickly:
>
> | p | q | p implies q |
> |---+---+---------------|
> | T | T | T                |
> | T | F | F                |
> | F | T | T                |
> | F | F | T                |
>
> which looks perfect in my buffer, but not so good on an HTML export, i.e.,
> the third column values seem too crowded to the left. Hence, how does one
> justify that last column to be center? Googling, I kept being directed to
> this
> <http://orgmode.org/manual/Column-width-and-alignment.html#Column-width-and-alignment>
> page,
> which supposedly tells me how. Long story short, the A-ha! angel smiled,
> and in the end I guessed that I'm supposed to do this:
>
> | p | q | p implies q |
> |---+---+---------------|
> | T | T | T                |
> | T | F | F                |
> | F | T | T                |
> | F | F | T                |
> |    |    |<c>              |
>
> which does in fact move the third column contents to the center -- on
> export only. But that's not the norm for me, mainly because the explanation
> has no example. Sure, it said, *To set the width of a column, one field
> anywhere in the column may contain just the string ‘<N>’ where ‘N’ is an
> integer specifying the width of the column in characters. *But it's really
> not so obvious that you create an extra dummy row and stick <c> in it -- at
> least not to me.
>
> I know from math courses that a text passage can be terribly opaque -- *until
> you get it -- *then it seemed obvious. However, I can see any beginner with
> org-mode getting frustrated often with the Manual. And of course I can site
> many similar examples where only the Sheldon types would get it.
>
> I guess I'm saying it would be nice to have a big omnibus O'Reilly-style
> tutorial on how to use org-mode. I've hung with org-mode because I think
> it's great and, IMHO, should become a standard tool in all
> STEM/STEM-education settings. Think of all those high schools (and even
> colleges) forcing students to use "graphic calculators." What a waste!
>
> LB


-- 
Tim Cross