Scrivener is a fantastic program – my favorite writing tool ever. (I’ll write more about why, and post some reviews, on another day when I’m not working.) The updated feature set in Scrivener 2 and 2.2 is marvelous!
Now that I’m using the new features – along with a bunch of the old features I hadn’t used before – I’m spending a lot more time in the manual. I realize that with the program that gets updated as frequently as Scrivener, maintaining an up-to-date user manual is a big job. Especially since Scrivener has so many features now. Given the complexity of the program, the manual is pretty good. What I noticed was not so much a problem per se as a mismatch between how the user manual is written, and how I as a user am accessing it.
Because the manual is a PDF, has a table of contents with links and is searchable, but lacks an index, I access it using a PDF reader rather than printing it out. A search can land me anywhere in the manual without having read the preceding material. (This is similar to web design, where a user can land on any page via a search engine link. It took web designers years to change their writing style to accommodate this.)
I keep having the experience of finding the specific information I want, and having the manual refer to some control in some dialog box or drop-down menu… but it doesn’t say which one. Then I have to read backward, sometimes for pages, to figure out where to locate the control. Is it in the Compile drop-down? In Scrivener’s Preferences? In the project settings, and if so, which ones, and where do I find them?
I suspect a lot of other people are also reading the manual in a PDF viewer, finding the items they want using Search or links from the manual’s table of contents, and running into the same problem.
I think one simple change could do a lot to improve the situation. Instead of referring to “the Options… button in the table header bar”, and leaving it to the reader to figure out where it is located, the manual can instead set a clear context by telling the reader exactly where to find the control in question. (In this case, the path is File > Compile > the Formatting pane of the Compile drop-down > click the Options… button.)
This could be done in a footnote at the bottom of the page so as not to interrupt the flow of text. Using footnotes would also minimize rewriting.
(Please don’t use end notes! They require extra work flipping back and forth between note and content, and make it likelier that user will lose their place in the manual.)
Thanks for having a user manual that’s as good as it is. And great job on the new versions and the new features!