Hey Michael,

I'm the author of that terrible document.

On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 08:32:36AM -0500, Michael Saunders wrote:
> > No, it's plain English. Unfamiliar phrases are just one consequence of a
> > language becoming the world standard. Do you want to flame Italians or
> > French for not adhering to the norms of classical Latin? You don't.
> > There's no point at all in even mentioning somebody's stylistic
> > idiosyncrasies on the internets. Just face it: the world won't adopt
> > English as a global means of communication without interfering with its
> > norms. If you don't understand something why don't you contact the
> > author, his email adress is right there on the first page.
> 
> I don't mind non-native speakers using bad grammar, strange usages, or
> odd constructions at all.  Things like that are usually no problem for
> native speakers to understand, although the two sentences I quoted
> were not "plain English" at all---one was completely indecipherable.
> The biggest problem with the docs is far more basic---it's the most
> basic mistake a beginning writer can make.  I'm sure documents like
> the ones I was shown on this thread make perfect sense to their
> authors---who already know what they mean---but they fail to
> communicate their message to anyone who doesn't already know it.  The
> reader isn't being given enough information to decode the message and
> what he is given is in no particular order:  it's whatever bits and
> pieces of the story the author thinks of in the order he happens to
> think of them.

I'm sorry for my writing and the inconvenience it brings.  However
right now I cannot do anything about it.  May be I will rewrite it
in the summer.
 
> You can't tell the author this.  It makes sense to him and he can't
> understand the criticism.  He has to put himself in the place of the
> reader who doesn't already know the message.  If he can't do that, he
> can't communicate.  I'm sure that these documents would be just as bad
> in the native languages of the authors as they are in English.  The
> fault is far deeper than bad translation.

Actually I do understand your feeling.  Like I said, I may rewrite
most part of it in the summer.

And BTW, that document is *supposed* to be an extraction of some
particular pieces of info in the official doc.  Because I find the
official doc too heavy for both my PDF viewer and me.  And about the
background, I just grabbed some random Asymptote file of mine.  Though
I find it pretty much ok, I may change that also in the future.

Let's focus on the tooltip and external database issue you
encountered, instead of discuss that document and my bad writing :-).

-- 
There is no emotion; there is peace.
There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.
There is no passion; there is serenity.
There is no death; there is the Force.