Hi drmajorbob
Are you referring to the Scrivener Manual that is available from the Help > drop-down menu, or is there yet another ‘Scrivener project version of the manual’ ?
Re your: “but in general it still requires knowing what a thing is called, when that may be precisely the fact you don’t know.”
I cannot agree with you more … it is difficult to search for something in the Scrivener manual when you don’t know what ‘it’ is called.
In fact, I have an ongoing discussion in another posting (Number of unique screens in Scrivener for Mac? - #2 by scrive) in an attempt to find out what options could be available to name each Scrivener object.
Unfortunately, after some research and reflection, I’ve come to understand that the underlying structure of Object-Oriented-Programming (OOP) and the enormous coding benefits available from OOP may run counter to creating and maintaining a linguistic name for each and every screen object that is rendered and displayed to the user.
If this is in fact the case, it shifts the burden for effective user documentation toward improved search and indexing capabilities such as proximity word search, but also so much more, so that if I search for ‘rename Styles’, I’ll instead be referred to ‘redefine Styles’ to learn how to rename my Styles.
I have no idea what tools are available to create that type of search engine, except perhaps some sort of hybrid, dynamic thesaurus or synonym-index search that we all are familiar with, e.g. Google?
That raises the question: Is there a copy of the Scrivener manual available online that can be searched using Google? If so, I’d love to see how it would handle a search for ‘rename Style’ in the Scrivener manual. Would such a Google search return ‘redefine Styles’ as a suggestion for ‘renaming Styles’?
Thanks for reading,
scrive
