Who serves as the maintenance editor for the documents at CC? I have noticed some errors in the documentation--VSD Help PDF. Also, there is a missing period (full stop) in a sentence in one of the dialog boxes in the VSD implementation.

Detroit,

If you give a more specific location of the error, someone from CoffeeCup staff will see it. It may not get fixed immediately unless it affects the operation, but when I have pointed out errors in documentation, they have been fixed on the next release of the program.

The Help document for VSD has some minor copyediting errors that point out that the document was not adequately copyedited or proofread. For example: the word "as" is represented by "and" instead. Also, URLs used in two examples have erroneous formats.

All this will be corrected with the release of 6.1 and it will be in the new PDF format.

OK. There were quite a number of errors, though. Some minor, some substantive.

Some of the instructions in the Walkthrough tutorial are not strictly accurate if one follows them to the letter. In addition, the editing would be improved if the straight and curly quotation marks were not mixed. IOW, change those straight quotes to the curlies, in order to have all all the same.

Some words that should have been capitalized are not, and vice versa...

The term "Picture" was erroneously used for "Image" for one GUI element's description. Some of the descriptions do not adhere to the order of the menuitems.

I will keep marking up some of copy and technical errors for my own use while reading the text and will see how version 6.1 handles them. BTW, I do technical editing for a living, so this "busy work" on my part is merely an exercise for me--much like doing a crossword puzzle...

Gary

Hey Gary!

I'm the resident technical copywriter/editor, so these are all my mistakes :p If you could give me specific page numbers and point out exactly where the errors occur, I'll be able to pinpoint and correct them.

Also, like Scott told you, the new VSD update is going to include a brand-spankin'-new PDF manual with a cleaner, more intuitive design.

Any further suggestions are always appreciated!

It might be best to wait for the new version. But one thing you should check is having all the quotation marks (and apostrophes) use the same curly (smart) format instead of the mixture of the two or three different quotation-mark formats (including differing typefaces, possibly even...) you currently have in the current version.

Another thing: You refer to the various tools, which use "headline capitalization" in the GUI tooltips, with "sentence capitalization" in the PDF manual. I generally use whatever formatting that is present in the GUI tooltips, even if that is incorrect and is subject to eventually being fixed. In addition, you employ sentence capitalization in your ToC, but use headline capitalization for the actual subheads. I suppose that you will employ automatic ToC creation/maintenance, keyed to the actual subheads, in the new version. (Sentence capitalization is usually preferred over headline capitalization for most nonfiction writings.)

I do the lead technical editing for the user guides and maintain the template and style guides for the open-sourced OpenOffice.org (OOo) software suite (supported by Sun Microsystems) and generally (always?) use the GUI format versions for guidelines in our documentation.

Gary