I like how complete and mostly readable the online documentation is, and I also like how results in the online docs come up in web searches. What is causing me a lot of difficulty is how often web search results take me to an old version of the documentation and I can’t easily find the same page in the latest documentation.
For example, if I search for “Dorico text tokens” I get a first hit on the Dorico documentation, which is good, but it’s for Dorico 2.2.20 documentation, which is bad. If I search “Dorico 5 text tokens”, I get a top result for Dorico 3.1.10 documentation.
There’s an online help system for software that is not music related where whenever you get to any document for any version of the software, there’s a way to get to the same document for the latest or other version of the software. In the upper-left of each documentation page, there’s a version chooser. So no matter where you land in the documentation, you can go and choose the version of the software you are using.
I think if the Dorico online documentation also had this feature, it would make it quite possibly the best music software documentation site I know of.
I’m sure there’s a workaround for at least 90% of feature requests, just as there’s a workaround for this one. IMHO that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t request any features.
This has been repeatedly discussed on the forum for years.
The problem is that you cannot control Google search. The search engine gives more weight to older versions of the documentation because it has been viewed and accessed more times because it’s older. And so Google serves those results more frequently… and then it becomes a self-feeding cycle. This is out of Steinberg’s hands. This is why Ben says you should just bookmark the current version. (You can also access it directly from within Dorico itself, and it will take you to the proper version.
Our manuals team are well aware of the wish to be able to more easily move between different documentation for different versions of our applications. A project is underway to replace the publishing system we are using at the moment for our online documentation, and I believe this kind of thing will become possible when the new system is implemented.