Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
cybmole, chill. We're supposed to be on the same side here.
Despite his Praky-like respons, cybmole does have a point. To us, conventional shorthand means the same thing as standard terminology; to someone who's not familiar with it, it doesn't. There really are people who don't know that a "regex" and a "regular expression" are the same thing. I'm married to one, and I'm not married to an idiot; just to someone who doesn't geek in the quite same directions as I do. We don't need to dumb down material, we need to smarten up users -- but we need to give those users somewhere to grab hold. This should include both using some standard of terminology in documentation, and providing a glossary where they can find out what it means if they don't already know. "Regex" is a low-content term for a complicated concept; at least "regular expression" is made of words that make some kind of sense, so the reader can hold onto some hope that they can eventually learn what those words mean in this context and how they go together. Calling them "fluffy unicorns" would be wrong because that's not a standard term for the concept; "regular expressions" is both standard and meaningful.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Which is why I barely use Calibre, and mostly for conversions to something I can open in Word and reformat to reader-sized PDFs. I don't know regex, and the tutorials assume a level and type of geekery I don't have.
I love Calibre and encourage lots of people to use it; I barely touch it myself because the learning curve is steep enough to be frustrating, and my doc conversion skills in other programs make it not worth the effort.
My eyes glazed over at "strings of text."
I'm vaguely aware that "regex" is High Geek for "search function," and is more powerful & versatile than just calling it search-and-replace. That doesn't make the explanation make any more sense to me. I can follow it if I concentrate very hard, and translate about half the words individually, but that's not the same as "read and understand."
Text, for me, is made of words. Or letters. Not "strings." When I think about it, I realize why the term "strings" is used; "words" and "characters" aren't specific and accurate enough. But that doesn't change the fact that an explanation of a geek term written in other geek terms is still opaque. I get that simplifying the explanation, or using layman's terms for the details, would be inaccurate; that doesn't make it any easier to understand.
There is probably no simple solution for this, just a need for patience all around.
Someone (who is fluent in the Calibre subdialect of Geek, and has ridiculous amounts of spare time & goodwill toward their fellow ebook readers) might consider putting together a small collection of tutorials in common newbie topics, like "How To Make Collections" or " or "How To Make Chapter Headings," that being the hurdle that's caused me to mostly give up on it. (I got instructions. I attempted to follow them. The results did not have chapter headings, or did not have page breaks before chapter breaks, and I shrugged and went back to making custom-sized PDFs with bookmarks.)
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I love Calibre,(and use it daily, but realize I have barely scratched the surface of what it is capable of), and highly respect Kovid and the rest of the developers, as anyone who reads my posts here should be able to tell. (At least if they ignore the smart remarks peppered in there, LOL!) However, I do have to agree with the posts I quoted above: Regex might as well be Greek to me (and I don't speak Greek). Not wanting to be a troll, or labeled clueless (which I am when it comes to Regex), I did what research I could
on my own before my own eyes started glazing over (which was about the same time as Elfwreck's), and then said, "never mind, I'll live without them". Which I have, quite happily, so far. The same with the GUI plugins. I saw "GUI" and my mind went, "Oh, yayyy! Something I can follow..." and .. ummm, no. Which of course is not anyone's fault but my own. I would LOVE to be able to help with calibre, but my one area of expertise is proofreading, and there doesn't seem to be much call for that, LOL. I love GUI improvements, as Kovid can testify to (read the thread about wanting a cover/grid/bookshelf screen), but as to how to implement that, I don't have a clue. I even tried downloading source and learning Qt Designer, only to find out that the main calibre interface uses pure Python, not a design interface I can "see". At that point, I decided I'd just sit back and wait patiently (or as patiently as possible) until someone had the time and the desire to mess with it.
Yes, I'm rambling (Worldwalker, you're contagious?), but I think you've hit the nail on the head. Give me something to grab, and I'm more than willing to take it from there, I just need that starting point.
Disclaimer: NONE of the above should be taken as a complaint, mainly because none of it is intended to be a complaint, or a reproach, or anything else negative. If anyone is at fault for my lack of understanding and eyes-glazing-over, it's myself.