Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
The first two lines from the wikipedia article on regular expressions (emphasis mine)
Regular expression
In computing, a regular expression, also referred to as regex or regexp, provides a concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. A regular expression is written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, a program that either serves as a parser generator or examines text and identifies parts that match the provided specification. |
Ok, here is a perfect example of why documentation needs to be simplified for many users. I know more about computers than most of my friends yet the above passage made absolutely NO sense to me whatever. And, to be honest, I don't care what it means. I'm not a programmer and don't want to be.
An example of why is a recent thread I started regarding LN,FN in the author column and the tag editor. I quickly abandoned for now the idea of "fixing" my calibre installations because the thread became too complicated (for me) to follow even though I had asked for simple step by step explanations (I still have the thread, and others similar to it, bookmarked). Some of you have disparaged users who want a step by step explanation of how to do things but the fact is many of us NEED just that. I started using calibre simply because I needed a program that could manage my soon to be large collection of e-books (or pseudo e-books, as many believe image only PDFs to be
). Calibre meets that need for me better than any program I have tried, free or paid, and keeps getting better so, even though I do not understand half (or more) of its features enough to use them, I will continue to use calibre (and I have contributed financially so it's not like I'm freeloading) until something better comes along (something I'm not holding my breath for, even though one of the malcontents here claims he is writing a better one).
Frankly, I'm not interested on learning computer programming so I can understand the directions; I have other fish to broil (frying is too greasy). The difference between many potential users of calibre (and current users like me) and the power users here is many of us just want a program to do what we need it to without wasting a lot of time learning a lot of technical jargon and having to go through a bunch of complicated steps to to achieve our needs (heck, that's what the computers are for in the first place). Power users, on the other hand, seem to get off on complexity and technicality. I don't disparage them for it but, at the same time, I don't appreciate being put down for not sharing that fervor (however, I don't feel anyone here has done that intentionally or maliciously).
I use MS Word heavily. I had no trouble learning to use it, including some of the more complicated aspects, such as creating tables, framing for properly formatting text and illustrations, using enhanced metafiles for inverting text on pages that will befolded into small books (chapbooks), etc. even though documentation is almost non-existent. I was able to adapt to the new ribbon in Word 2007 without any problems.
Same goes for when I first got Adobe Acrobat Standard a little over a year ago. Despite it's reputation of being a difficult program to use, I hit the ground running with it and it quickly became all I use for working with PDFs.
I had little trouble learning to use the music notation program I used to use up to five years ago (I no longer arrange music). Back then, I was the one to turn to on the forum for that product for "creative" ways of getting the program to do things it wasn't really intended to do. I never had complaints from anyone that my directions were too difficult to follow nor that they were too simple.
Calibre, on the other hand, took a lot more effort for me to learn to use just the basic functions. It took what documentation it has plus a lot of help from folks here to learn how to use it at the limited level I'm at now. Even though most power users here will disagree, I find the GUI to not be very intuitive and, often, achieving a simple end, such as displaying authors as LN, FN, requires complicated means. The thread for creating catalogs was useless for me; I quickly became glassy eyed trying to read through it (granted, having ADD didn't make it any easier; too much data flowing through my brain at once shuts it down). Fortunately, I was was able to work out a Michael Mouse procedure that gave a usable PDF to use on my JBL.
That said, I must say that calibre, despite the fact I feel it is unnecessarily complex to use at times and the documentation difficult to use, is still an excellent program and the help I've received here is excellent. I don't expect any major changes simplifying the GUI and documentation anytime soon since a lot of effort is going into making calibre better and more useful and working on the GUI and the documentation would both divert effort away from improving the program and would require duplicated effort to constantly update both. I started using calibre last summer and the changes just since then have been phenomonal. I thank you all for that.