How do I search the manual?

DonGateley · Post by **DonGateley** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 3:29 am

I can't find the search box for locating terms in the manual. How do I do that?

Not index, not FAQ, but search.

Thanks

Post by **steve** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:39 am

Unfortunately the "frozen" 2.0.3 manual that is included with Audacity does not have a search function. However, the on-line development version does have search (http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Main_Page). There will be some differences in this manual as it is being constantly updated for the next Audacity release.

For a better search you can harness the power of Google's search engine. Do a search on Google and prefix your search with:

Code: Select all

site:http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/

For example, to look up "Equalization" you could enter:

Code: Select all

site:http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/ Equalization

Another good place to "find" things is on the first page of the manual. For looking up the references to interface components, scroll down to the picture of the Audacity interface. There are pop-up "tool tips" for most of the interface elements, and clicking will take you to the related page.

Note that the spelling throughout the Audacity documentation is American rather than English.

DonGateley · Post by **DonGateley** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 5:44 pm

Hey, the Google trick is killer! I had no idea you could do that with Google. Is there a way to find anything other than the first occurrence of the search term or to step through the occurrences? "Next" in other words.

Post by **steve** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 5:56 pm

Searching for phrases often works well with Google. To search for a phrase rather than separate words, put the phrase in quotes.
For example, this search took me straight to the page I was looking for:

Code: Select all

site:http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/ "Label Tracks"

rather than lots of irrelevant hits on the separate words "Label" and "Tracks".

DonGateley · Post by **DonGateley** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 8:59 pm

Ah, I found a way to get what is needed. I downloaded the manual and then used Adobe Acrobat to convert the whole thing to a PDF (Shift-Ctrl O) by pointing it at the index.html file. I was then able to use a PDF viewer to search the document for things of interest and step through the occurrences.

I've put the PDF's in my public Dropbox for anyone's use. Links, both internal and external, work as expected. I highly recommend they be placed on the Audacity site.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/17163211/Audacity%20Manual.pdf

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/17163211/Getti ... Manual.pdf

Post by **steve** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 9:28 pm

Thanks DonGateley, the conversion seems to have worked very well.
I've asked the Audacity Team about the possibility of putting the pdf versions on the Audacity web site. As far as I'm aware, the reason that this has not already been done is that there were problems with the conversion to pdf format, but (from only a quick look) these seem to be fine.

DonGateley · Post by **DonGateley** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 10:08 pm

Tell whoever is responsible for releasing the documents to notify me of new releases and I'll replace the files I linked to with new ones.

Is there a locked thread that notifies of new document releases. If so, I can just subscribe to it but I wouldn't want to receive any traffic other than official releases.

Gale Andrews · Post by **Gale Andrews** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 10:42 pm

steve wrote:Unfortunately the "frozen" 2.0.3 manual that is included with Audacity does not have a search function.

We do hope to include a search box in the online version of the released Manual ( http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/ ) at some future time.

It's not recommended to go into the alpha development Manual ( http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Main_Page ) as that only relates to the Nightly Development Builds and so could contain features that are not in the current release, might not refer to features that have been changed or removed, and so on.

Gale

Gale Andrews · Post by **Gale Andrews** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 10:53 pm

Don, thanks for your input and efforts.

DonGateley wrote:Tell whoever is responsible for releasing the documents to notify me of new releases and I'll replace the files I linked to with new ones.

If you are not already doing so, you may subscribe here http://audacityteam.org/#announce
to receive an e-mail when we release new versions of Audacity. To subscribe, enter your e-mail address and click "Add". There is no other traffic.

Let's see what happens. We may prefer to host this ourselves, or we may or may not approve giving out your link. Many Dropbox links posted on the Forum seem to fail for one reason or another, so we would definitely want the link to be reliable.

I notice the links in the image map on the Front Page of your PDF Manual don't work correctly (at least in PDF-XChange viewer) but this is not a surprise.

I don't think there is any need for a second version of the Manual, with "Getting Started" at the top, but thanks for the idea.

Gale

Post by **steve** » Tue Mar 12, 2013 11:26 pm

DonGateley wrote:Tell whoever is responsible for releasing the documents to notify me of new releases and I'll replace the files I linked to with new ones.

I was hoping that you might volunteer

Thanks.

Audacity Forum

How do I search the manual?

How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?

Re: How do I search the manual?