The user manual is waaaaaaaaaaaaay too wordy. It’s put together as though the reader may be looking forward to settling down on the sofa with it for several days whilst enjoying hot chocolate and a roaring fire.
I think it might be an idea to cut out the chaff and concentrate on conveying the information as quickly as possible.
I’m currently scrolling through around 10 pages just to learn how to add a front cover…
Edit: gave up with manual. For an example of expected conciseness of a user manual, see:
Thanks for the feedback! I’ve always been the sort that prefers a user manual that is comfortable to read, uses illustrations to explain the feature set, and goes into why things work the way they do. Our manual certainly reflects that preference, and by and large I receive positive feedback on the style—you’d be surprised how many people actually do curl up on a sofa and read it.
There are of course those out there that prefer otherwise (they tend also to feel their preference is the only correct way, I’ve noticed). I hear you, but I don’t like those kinds of manuals myself, find them borderline useless, and would be bored to death making one. You’ll have to live with it, or look elsewhere.
Sorry you had a hard time finding this, but the main problem is that what you’re looking for doesn’t exist. There is no way to add a cover page to a PDF in Scrivener, nor will there be in the near future.
I do try to help with the common stuff people ask about that the software doesn’t do, but not many people are trying to replace their desktop publishing program with Scrivener (or quickly learn they shouldn’t be trying to). Adding cover pages to PDFs just doesn’t come up much.
Documenting negatives is probably a better task for knowledge bases and forum posts anyway.
While there is indeed a workaround solution, surely you can understand that detailing alternative solutions for all the things that Scrivener doesn’t do would make the manual less concise.
I felt that sentences were unnecessarily wrong. That there seemed to be a lot of apologies. That there was too much explanation of why a feature had been changed from the previous version. I found the manual exasperating. There are far too many things annoying about it than can be said here.
(Apologies if this looks like a flame.)
That’s fair! The amount of discussion about what has changed, and why, is something that I have been gradually editing out, as I do agree with that point of criticism. I think it is more effective to just describe how things work, and only refer to changes if they are significant.
It’s interesting you would consider anything to be an apology. There may be areas where we have received a category of consistent feedback or expressed confusion over the years, and so I’ll attempt to anticipate that—and I suppose it could be read that way without that context. It’s something I’ll keep in mind as I go over the text.
Let me know what you found that was incorrect (if that is what you mean), I’d love to fix any inaccuracies.
That copy is a bit old, I’ll be updating it with all of the Windows edits in a bit. I ran into a problem with how lists were formatted (you’ll probably see what I mean in that older version), so I’m having to switch them over to Markdown. There are a lot of lists though, so it’s been a process.
Understood. It does, however, satisfy the want/need of a Scrivener project of the manual. I’m glad you are still updating those, even if I just use the PDF output. It is a reminder of what all can be done with Scrivener.
