Paul wrote:
I fixed a ton of those problems in my MS-Word and RTF versions of the FractInt v.20.2 Documentation. Plus, cleaned up a lot of the layout and grammatical errors as well: http://www.Nahee.com/FractInt/Master_Word_Doc.zip and http://www.Nahee.com/FractInt/FractInt.rtf
Unfortunately in order to help us, we need to know what those fixes are in the help*.src files. Otherwise we can't flow the fixes back into the original files. (BTW editing the docs directly does not require any programming skills, only a text editor, and a willingness to cope with some very simple hypertext commands.)
Well, after the public comments about what John Wilson had already accomplished (and not hearing anything from him since, either publicly or privately), one of the valued workers seems to now have been lost.
I have corresponded with John off line. He has unsubscribed from all the fractal lists he is on and is spending his time on other interests. He has not indicated any reason. It might have been because of embarrassment over having posted FC2 files without permission or not. We simply don't know.
It may be a lot of work, but I guess we need to make sure there are not more rules and complications before people volunteer to try and do something useful for such projects. I would hate to see more efforts wasted.
Over the years many dozens of people have contributed on a volunteer basis to fractint. The team has never been demanding of any volunteer and has been generous with acknowledgement. People have come and gone as their interests and circumstances have changed. I've learned not to worry about it. If John wants to contribute he can. If not, that's his decision. We shouldn't second guess John's motivations since we don't know what all is going on in his life. I hardly think there are an excess of "rules and complications". It is manditory to have a clear understanding about the posting of copyrighted works. My request of posting a small readme file with any book scans is probably naively simple by hardly an onerous requirement. John was unlucky in being the first to post files, thereby necessitating a decision on my part. Scanning FC2 is not a simple project and will be a big effort if it's done. I'm not sure myself if it's worth the effort. Since John isn't going to post his own files, maybe I should. Looking again, there definitly is some editing needed in chapter one. Tim