MarvinSketch help contents and User's Guide

Hi, reading in another topic the sentences


The search engine of Marvin help is not perfect indeed. We are working on porting the help into other formats, some will probably come with more sophisticated search engine, though it will take a while to complete.


To have a better search engine is not so important. When the structure of the help window corresponds to the GUI, than it is easy to find the adequate help.


And I think it would be much more important to improve the content and to add more information.


It is often not possible to get the reference literature (sometimes too old, sometimes too expensive). So the main declarations and explanations should be in the help file.





And the online User's Guide for MarvinSketch and the User's Guide offline included in MarvinSketch must be the same.





Regards, Hans-Ulrich

Dear Hans-Ulrich,





I am ChemAxon's documentation writer, Annamaria Jakab. I am glad to see you are really interested in improving the documentation. So far, it was more a 'Stiefkind' during development, of second-grade priority and it has been only recently "upgraded" to its present form by programmers, not chemists. We are planning a whole documentation restructuring and content extension, coming most probably with the next major release (5.2).





As for the offline and online version: I am feeling ambiguous with this issue, whether it is recommended to have different helps. Reported mistakes are sometimes really urgently fixed and this is instantly available then for the users through our site. These are mostly fixes that should not be waiting until the next release (whether minor or major). Of course these corrections are implemented in the next release's help. But since many users do not upgrade instantly to the latest Marvin version, it never prepared any problems.





I would appreciate your comments concerning missing description.





Regards,


Annamaria

Dear Annamaria,





I really know the problem: programmers don't like to produce comments in their code and documentations for their algorithms.


But I am a programmer and a chemist, and I learned long years ago from a chemistry professor, who had more comment lines in his FORTRAN code than commands.





Documentation and excellent help information has to have first grade priority !





To the difference of the online and the offline version: Yes, the online version must be corrected and suplemented as fast as possible. But the offline version should also be updated with each new release and the content must then be equal.





Finding more deficiencies I will post these here.





Regards, Hans-Ulrich

Online help is automatically updated with every new release. If any differences exist afterwards, they are only the result of some mistake of mine, not changing the text everywhere I should have. I am improving myself with this as well.





Thank you for your interest.