[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by KevinH

ps. Since it is only a one line change that will not completely invalidate the user guide spellcheck images, I have aligned the count field right (numerically). Any change in column order will have to come in a future release just not our upcoming one.

Thanks! Looking forward to seeing the changes!

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Way to throw mbear and GregBell under the bus!! Lol

lol. Well, I assume Mbear is a "typical user"!

The past year, I've been spending more time on author subreddits, like /r/selfpublishing, and see a lot of the common (new user) ebook questions/issues that keep getting brought up again and again.

I've also been speaking with Gregg when he writes a new book (few times a year)—so I tend to get an author, non-expert, non-person-who-sits-on-MR-every-day-and-absorbs-every-post perspective:

• "Should I update Sigil to the latest?"
  
  • Yes! Of course!
    
  • (With very rare exceptions.)
    
  • And keep your LibreOffice up-to-date too!
    
• "My Linux version is older and my Windows version is newer. Is this going to mess up my book?"
  
  • No! It's fine if they're slightly different versions.
• "How do I do X again? I haven't used Sigil in 9 months."
• "What's that trick you told me 4 years ago?"
  
  • The one about <title> + proper lang?
    
  • 2018: "Two questions"
• [...]

- - -

Side Note: Last month, I came across this fantastic talk:

• PyCon AU 2017: "What nobody tells you about documentation"

It discussed the 4 distinct sets of documentation:

• Tutorials
• How-To Guides
• Discussions
• Reference

and explained how each one serves a different purpose:

• Tutorials = Learning-Oriented
• How-To Guides = Problem-Oriented
• Discussions = Understanding-Oriented
• Reference = Information-Oriented

The talk completely blew my mind... and anyone who is interested in helping the Sigil ecosystem should watch it.

(Personally, I'll be focusing more of my efforts into Tutorials+How-To Guides. We already have enough buried in Discussions/Reference.)

- - -

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I actually played around with this spellcheck stuff… and the periods after a duplicate word was a slight annoyance, but not that big a deal. Once you add the root word to a dictionary you can refresh the spelling list… it finds the word(s) in the dictionary and doesn’t display them in the misspelled list anymore. The refresh is very fast.

Toggling between 4 states:

• ON/OFF = Show All Words
  
  • OFF = Only show misspelled words.
• ON/OFF = Case-Insensitive Sort

+ sorting by Alphabetical/Count reveals all sorts of useful things.

Each one has its own uses. For example, easily finding all US<->UK spellings or finding all "foreign" words:

• 2019: "Export list of words in spellcheck"
• 2019: "Is there a way to use the selection in a Saved Search?"

The near-doubling of hits (and messed up counts) completely regressed such workflows.

And, as I explained above, the sheer amount of work you can get done by:

• pure visuals
• + pattern recognition

is immense.

- - -

Side Note: It's very similar to the great table design principles shown in this fantastic GIF:

• "How to make your tables less terrible"

And my 2 posts in:

• 2021: "Formatting tables best practices" (Post #4 + Post #9)

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte lays it all out.

When working with (tabular) data, you want to remove as much "visual clutter" as possible, and the data becomes much more readable/understandable.

People think they need all those horizontal/vertical lines. No.

People think they need the same info repeated on every single row. No.

Once you begin removing redundancies, and use simple whitespace, things become infinitely more understandable.

Less is more!

- - -

That's all I have to say on this subject for now. I'll be backing off for a while.