Interrobang's Journal: Help?

(Hmm, no topic for "Documentation." How boring we are.)

I'm working away on my help file for Mr. Mississauga (when I finish the project, remind me and I'll link it), and I come upon this one dialogue box which has a little "help" icon button in the corner. Thinking "WTF?" I clicked it, and this entire compiled help file of probably 10 000 words appeared. I think it's some kind of artifact of the environment Mr. M. used to make that section of the software, because I looked at the thing, and there's no effin way Mr. M. himself wrote it -- different writing style, different vocabulary and word entropy, different typographical and orthographical conventions, and whoever put together this big help file had much better spelling and a completely different diction. Also, the help file references Datalogics and seems to come from there. I have no idea what this is or why it's in there, but I think I should mention it. If Mr. M. has plagiarised some code, I think he should at least cover his tracks a bit better than that... *grin*

Project-wise, I'm about halfway through the writing bit, and I've finished the preliminary editing and tidying on the existing bit. I hope to have a draft to Mr. M. by Friday afternoon, and it looks like I'm on schedule to do that, assuming I can actually wake up and be somewhat alert tomorrow before 9PM or so... (Woke up around 1:30 this afternoon, and couldn't get unbleared enough to work before 9... Igh. Fatigue sucks.)

Entropy

[LPetrazickis]

Entropy is a quantity that could be interpreted as amount of 'chaos' or unpredictability, in the sense that lower values of entropy are equivalent with higher amounts of order or predictability. If a string of characters has full predictability, it carries no information. Once one knows the first character, one can predict all subsequent ones: one knows everything. The entropy of a piece of text is therefore also a measure of the amount of information it carries.

...
[Snip a bit about dice and how a load

See...

[Interrobang]

Isn't that technical enough forya? I dunno, maybe I ought to have filed this entry under "books" rather than "programming." Hard to say. Then again, I do compile a help file. *mutter* Bloody MS Help Workshop.

What it is or why it's there

[Tomble]

I think it's some kind of artifact of the environment Mr. M. used to make that section of the software,

Given the examples of software on the site you showed me, I'd say almost certainly yes. Have you ever seen a phpBB forum on a website? Odds are you have, but it's vaguely plausible you might have not seen the name on them. If you go to such a forum and go to look at the FAQ, you will see a whole load of FAQs for phpBB fora in general, and not to do with the specific site or the topics of the forum, or

On the other hand...

[Interrobang]

From the looks of this Label and Report Designer, it's got an interface roughly as complex as Photoshop's (not quite as bad as FrameMaker's, but more math -- if you want to get a vague idea, think a combination of Photoshop, a vector-graphics manipulation program with issues, and a spreadsheet), so the integral help is there probably to help people find their bloody way around it. Too bad the help file sucks!! It also has "it's" where it ought to have "its" and various and sundry other tpyos.

I knew ther