Subject: Re: bug#11689: [PATCH 00/14] Copyediting: etc/tutorials/TUTORIAL

From: Chong Yidong <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Jul 2012 18:40:25 +0800

> Whilst reading through the TUTORIAL, I made a few minor modifications.
> The following is a summary of the resulting patch series

Thanks.  I've committed these changes, with some exceptions:

> +the scroll bar; one often drags the scroll bar's handle, a rectangular
> +region that is within the scroll bar and that is used to represent the
> +portion of the text that is currently visible in the associated window.

I don't see the point of teaching people how to use scroll bars in the
Emacs tutorial, and anyway this is wrong for non-toolkit X builds.

> +(Note that "scrolling the text up and down" is commonly described as
> +"scrolling the screen (or window) down and up". In particular, note
> +the way in which the two descriptions use direction; scrolling may
> +be interpreted as either moving the text with respect to the user's
> +view, or moving the user's view with respect to the text.)

I'd rather not get into this in the tutorial, where the
scroll-up/scroll-down command names are not mentioned.

> -You can undo deletion of text just as you can undo killing of text.
> -The distinction between killing something and deleting it affects
> -whether you can yank it with C-y; it makes no difference for undo.
> +You can undo the removal of text regardless of whether the text was
> +yanked or killed; there is no distinction as far as undoing is
> +concerned.

This change is gratuitous, since it's more or less the same length.

> -You should save fairly often, so that you will not lose very much
> -work if the system should crash (see the section "Auto Save" below).
> +You should save fairly often, so that you do not lose very much
> +work if the system crashes (see the section "Auto Save" below).

I simply removed this, since the Emacs tutorial is not the place to
dispense this kind of general advice.

> Under TeX and Texinfo, `---' is actually what is meant to be an
> em dash, so that would be a better choice than `--', and is thus
> used to replace `--' a few times.

This is gratuitous--since this is a text file, not TeX or Texinfo, the
meaning should be fairly obvious.

Thanks for the copyedits.