documentation suggestions from new user

Hi there,

thanks for making Abiword available. I'm new to it, but finding it so
much lighter and quicker than OpenOffice.

I was on #abiword earlier today and was both told this is the place
for documentation suggestions and advised 1 longer email is preferred.
So, sorry, but this is a bit long :-) I have 3 groups of suggestions:

1) The FAQ page says:
2.2 How do I switch to VI or Emacs key bindings?
Note: This is not recommended for most users. Simply edit your
~/.AbiSuite/AbiWord.profile, and find the section beginning with that
<Scheme "_custom_". Simply add the line keybindings="emacs" or
keybindings="viEdit" as desired.
<http://www.abisource.com/help/en-US/problems/problemsfaq.html>

a) 'KeyBindings' rather than 'keybindings' worked for me. wiki article
reference in (b) claims that it must be bumpy-cased.

b) Information obtained at #abiword was needed to make this work for
me. I've updated
<http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/FaqEditorBindings>
with the info. Perhaps a link to that page in the FAQ entry would be good.

c) It is, I guess, a rare Windows user who will care about emacs
key-bindings. The Win user interested in emacs and unable to work out
"~/.AbiSuite/AbiWord.profile" would be even more rare. But, still I'd
suggest adding a reference to the location of AbiWord.profile on Win32
systems. On my WinXP box, it lives at C:\Documents and
Settings\Owner\AbiSuite\AbiWord.profile.

2) Reference to the wiki.
A reference to the wiki
<http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/WebHome> in one or
more of:

<http://www.abisource.com/help/en-US/index.html>
<http://www.abisource.com/help/en-US/problems/index.html>
<http://www.abisource.com/help/en-US/problems/problemshelp.html>

would be helpful. There may be a reference elsewhere in the docs, but
these are the three places I expected to find such things as a new user.

3) <http://www.abisource.com/help/en-US/problems/problemshelp.html>
suggests X-chat as an irc client for those not familiar with irc.
Might I suggest that the recommendation be changed? The rationale is
that following the X-chat link, I read:

23-Aug-2004
Due to the large amount of time and expense expended in creating
X-Chat for Windows, it will only be available to registered users from
now on. However, you can download and try 2.4.0 right now.
http://xchat.org/

According to <http://xchat.org/windows/> there is a shareware fee for
the binaries, though the code is available and thus one can compile a
version for free. But, Win32 users are the least likely to have the
tools and knowledge to build from source.

The X-chat developers are certainly entitled to charge for Windows
binaries, but it feels odd to me for a GPL project to recommend a tool
that for many users is non (beer) free.

This isn't an objective issue though, so by all means, feel free to
decide it isn't worth the worry. For what it is worth I used the GPL
and (beer) free Gaim on Win32 to get on #abiword. That was my first
use of irc and it was as easy as falling down :-)

Thanks and best,

Brian vdB
Received on Thu Jul 14 11:14:27 2005