99 problems

I've been meaning to update this for a while. I haven't looked at my C books for a few days. My brain can only handle a few really new technical problem at a time, and lately my big problem has been figuring out how to write a large user manual.

Google fails (or maybe I'm not doing it right) when you try to search for software that is designed for writing user manuals. What you get as results are manuals for software!

I thought about using Office, but after ~100 pages things get unwieldy. I tried using LyX (a LaTeX front-end) but it doesn't really get useful until you have many sections and adding images is..... well lets just say there is an entire "embedded objects" manual that frightens me. I started researching OpenOffice and I found it has a few clever tools for handling large documents. This might do for now, but I need to write a good bit of content to see if I can work with it.

My greatest obstacle is that my subject matter demands a substantial amount of lists and sections. LyX is fantastic for this, because it automatically handles renumbering things if I add in sections or items to a list. Word, as everyone knows, does this up to a point and then magically breaks after you get a few pages in. OpenOffice MIGHT do this - I need to explore the "Master Document" concept a bit more.

The second greatest obstacle is fluidity in style. I need to (for example) be able to change the font for every subject heading throughout the document without having to go to every single one and do it manually. LyX has this handled, Word MIGHT do this but probably not, and OpenOffice is meta-oriented enough that it would probably do this if I dig through the documentation enough.

I spent most of Sunday beating my head over the LyX introduction manual and tutorial and didn't make much headway. My goal over the weekend was to convert a quick-start guide written in Word to a different authoring program as a proof-of-concept, and that didn't happen. I haven't felt this defeated trying to learn a piece of software in a long time - maybe ever. Blender wasn't this hard. REAPER wasn't even this hard!

There is a really good section on how computers deal with fractions, signed integers, and floating numbers in the CarlH (Highercomputingforeveryone) C lessons. I did read through that on Friday. I'll count it as progress even though it's more of a reminder of stuff I learned five years ago.