Manual in html format

Hello,
is there a manual somewhere in plain html or markdown format? I would need it because of the automatic text translations that my web browser can do. It doesn’t translate PDF format at all, and has trouble with dynamic online documentation that is javascript driven. I also prefer offline documentation, I don’t have a permanent internet connection. I could save the Html manual after translation.
Thank you for the reply

What language would you like to read the manual in? We currently only translate it into German, Japanese, French and Italian, and while that set is unlikely to change, it’s very useful to get an idea of what other languages are desired and by how many users.

We provide our manuals online as webhelp and PDF, which you can download. We don’t provide static html and I don’t anticipate that we would.

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Já bych uvítal příručku v českém jazyce, ale to nepožaduji, vím že je to malý jazyk. Angličtinu ovládám málo, ostatní jazyky vůbec. My ve východním bloku jsme v mládí měli zakázáno učit se západní jazyky, abychom nemohli utíkat z totalitní země. Jsem odkázán na automatické překladače a dnes už je to docela snadné s překladačem ve webovém prohlížeči. Bylo by od vás hezké, kdybyste alespoň čas od času vydali dokumentaci ve formátu, který by nekladl překážky automatizovanému překladu a umožnil by nám lépe porozumět vašemu programu. Hodně by nám to pomohlo. Úmyslně píšu ve svém rodném jazyce, abyste si mohla představit, jak nesrozumitelná se mi jeví vaše dokumentace. Milosrdně ale přikládám automatizovaný překlad.

I would welcome a manual in Czech, but I don’t ask for it, I know it’s a small language. I have little knowledge of English, other languages not at all. We in the Eastern Bloc were forbidden to learn Western languages in our youth so that we could not flee from a totalitarian country. I depend on automatic translators and nowadays it is quite easy with a translator in a web browser. It would be nice of you to at least release documentation from time to time in a format that would not impede automated translation and would allow us to better understand your program. It would help us a lot. I am deliberately writing in my native language so that you can get an idea of how incomprehensible your documentation seems to me. But I am mercifully attaching the automated translation.

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vskutku milosrdně! :smiling_face:

Interestingly, you provide static html for Cubase 13 Pro: New Features

Same as for your other software, just not for Dorico.

have you heard of DeepL? That can translate PDFs. You may have to pay to translate something as big as the Dorico manual, I’m not sure, but you could try it on a smaller PDF with similar formatting to start with to see if it’s good enough.

I’ve used it on small PDFs a few times and for me it kept the graphics intact.

Very OT. Prague is a beautiful city, also Olomouc. That’s the two places I visited.

Jesper

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That’s our old archive help site - we moved to a new platform a few months ago.

You can still access Dorico 3.5 documentation on the archive site, which would probably still help a fair amount, although not for new or significantly changed features since 3.5 (such as most of Play mode).

I have bad experiences with PDF translations because the Czech is usually longer and so parts of the text disappear behind the margin or the text is overwritten one over the other and it is not very readable, the graphics are still well preserved. DeepL then mistranslates many musical terms. For example, ‘Note’ translates as ‘poznámka=comment’ instead of ‘nota=note’. Staff translates as ‘hůlka=stick’ instead of ‘notová osnova=staff’ and so on. DeepL is not suitable for music documentation. And the glossary that would address this is not supported in Czech.

It’s really sad that you’ve recently switched to an inferior documentation format that makes it less accessible to much of the world. Over time, this could affect your software preference. Try informing your management if they haven’t reconsidered. For some users, this is a step backwards.

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The intention was obviously to improve the documentation experience by carefully choosing a new platform and adjusting it to our requirements, but I will certainly pass on your feedback and use case.

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I understand. Have you tried any pdf to html converters?

Yes, there is no information in the pdf about the structure of the document, the formatting of the text, and even the text may be in a different order than on the screen. The more complex the document formatting, the worse the results. If you’ve ever tried it, you must know it yourself. Fixing such a result is very time consuming, tens to hundreds of hours of work. PDF is not a format suitable for any further work with, it is an output format. Taking the source text and exporting it work-free to html would be enough. The manual is available in html, unfortunately only dynamically generated, but I’m sure you can export it to static hrml with a ‘snap of the fingers’. But unfortunately there is no good will to do so. I’m mostly in the open source world and am disappointed by this commercial approach. It costs so much money and then there is no willingness for the customer to lift a finger and deliver the documentation in a reasonable format that allows for subsequent processing such as translation. Open source tends to be free and yet it is much more user friendly and the availability of documentation in a number of different formats that can be further worked with is standard.

I wouldn’t say it’s a question of good-will - that’s not lacking in the Dorico team. There needs to be a good case for it - and you’re helping make that.

Of course, the other end of the problem is the lack of translators to Czech in the browser.

Safari on the Mac can translate the Dorico Help Pages into Italian, French and German at the click of a button. I tried adding Czech to the list of my “preferred” languages, but it still wasn’t included.

We can only hope that things improve here, too – perhaps very soon.

I have the Czech translator DeepL in my browser, but it doesn’t understand the dynamically generated Dorico manual. It has absolutely no problems with the static manual for Cubase Pro 13.

Certainly the second statement here is thankfully not the case: I’ve already put this on our internal discussion agenda.

It might not, or probably not, change immediately but we put a lot of time & energy into providing the best documentation we can for all our users. Hopefully my personal and prompt engagement with your posts demonstrates that too.

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I can at least try to approach understanding how frustrating it must be to struggle with translation issues with software so rich and intricate. (I say “approach” simply because I am fortunate in not having that struggle with Dorico.)

But if you spend any time looking through this forum and observing the Dorico team members’ presence, assistance, and “listening” (which you can tell from today’s 5.1.60 version release just six weeks after MakeMusic’s big Finale announcement), I believe — or at least hope — you will decide to amend your opinion of their intentions.

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Another argument for having documentation in static HTML is that whenever I search for advice via google or AI, the links lead to old archived dorico documentation in static html, not current dynamic documentation. The latter is probably invisible to these systems, or at least not preferred.

Hi Lillie – I have an interface issue with the current online manual:

When I load the help page, I have to click in the Search box to type. If I start typing too fast, the loading of the TOC below (I think particularly: highlighting the title of the current page) removes the cursor from the search box and I can’t continue typing until I click in it again, which is irritating. I hope the page can be scripted to put the cursor in the input automatically, and keep it there.