New Help Format

[ekinsb]

With the latest release of Fusion, we also introduced a new help format.  You can learn more about the changes here: http://modthemachine.typepad.com/my_weblog/2015/07/new-api-help-format.html

I would appreciate any feedback.

[HughesTooling]

Just a comment on the appearance how easy to read the new help is. Well to me it's like looking through a letterbox at a grey smudge.

Here's an example. Why is the help part only using 50-60% of the screen, if you look at the old version below it so much easier to read!. Take into account the images are not to scale, try the links at the bottom of this message.

The grey and orange text are not as sharp and easy to read as the black and blue from the old help.

Look at this picture from the new help, the grey help text is no where near a easy to read as the text in the screen grab within the picture.

I made a post a while back about the help being hard to scan. I see one improvement the index on the left and the info on the right now scroll independently like the old help now all you need is to make it all look like the old help!.

Here are links to the new and old help for comparison.

New Help

Old Help

Just noticed with the new help you can't link to a specific page. I tried to make both of my links above go to "Python Specific Issues" but the new help wont do that.

Mark.

[ekinsb]

Thanks for your feedback.  There's one thing that I should have been more clear about in my posting.  There were two recent changes to the help.  One is to the way the syntax is displayed for API functions, as I decribed in my original post and the second is big changes to the way all of the Fusion help is displayed.  The API team noticed many of the same issues you've listed about the new help.  The change to make the table of contents scrollable independent of the content page was changed in response to our concerns.  We also expect the ability to get a link to a specific page back again.  That's a problem for me too when I want to send a link to a particular page.  There are a few other formatting issues too that still need to be addressed.  I'll pass on your feedback to the team responsible for the new help.

[Helmi74]

Unfortunately the usability for features around Fusion360 is often not too good. This is true for the forums and also for the documentation. Mark already said most of what the problem is, though i think the old version still wasn't a good example - still it was better than the new one. I don't know what process leads to a documentation caged into a big frame of website like it was done in the early 2000s.

Here's an example what a modern Documentation looks like to me https://sample-threes.readme.io/docs/orders

This is an example for code based documentations with code examples in the thrird column. There are more examples on the website of the service that offers that documentation platform https://readme.io/

This is just one example of course, but there are some key features that i find very important for an online documentation:

• relatively fast to click through
• uses the full browser content without static frames around that have nothing to do with the docs
• good readable contrasts
• not too small fonts, good typography (size/line height relation)
• content width not too wide for easy readability (FYI http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability)

At least some of the points are also valid for the forums.