One of the things I stumbled on in the last months was the Textual Images. If you go to a Pali sutta and turn on the Textual Information, you might see something like this:
When you click on the little book behind PTS 1.1, you get a scanned image of the original page of the PTS edition.
I did not know this feature was there until I broke it and somebody started complaining.
Another feature I often have to explain to people is that if you highlight part of the sutta-text, you can copy the URL of that highlighted part and use it in posts or emails.
Something I think many people do not know is why there are different fonts, markups, etc. on the text and what they mean. For instance, texts added by the translator, editorial editions or unclear reconstructions of the text.
And how many people know that for most languages, you can access the language pages directly like for instance polish is here: SuttaCentral
I agree with Bhante that a manual is a bit old-fashioned. Maybe a tutorial of some sort is more appropriate.
This feature is highly specialized, and only of interest to Pali scholars who want to check variant readings. Which is very, very few! Currently it has a title attribute, “View page image”. I think that’s good enough for such a limited usage.
Incidentally, the image there is a placeholder, it should be replaced with the appropriate Unicode glyph, U+1F4D6.
This is indeed a cool feature, and we should promote it. Any idea how?
These should all be described by appropriate title attributes. The alternative, used everywhere else, is to use some plain text markup [like square] brackets or (round ones) and {even curly ones} and expect people to know what they mean. If the existing style and/or title attributes need improvements, fine, but I don’t know of a better approach. One possibility might be to use the FAQ page here on Discourse for such things.
How about adding some “did you know” text in the sidebar under the Controls tab (there is enough space there).
Or have a random “did you know” popup with “tip of the day” upon startup. Or have a tutorial that runs through different features (activated from the sidebar maybe). Lots of options.
Here’s another small critique based on real-world experience, I was singing the praises of SC to a friend and he retorted that “but you can’t tell who did the translation”. I had to show him that you go to the three lines at the upper left and then click on “metadata”. It’s a bit hidden.
I would say that a feature like that should be promoted “in context”, in other words when you highlight some part of a sutta. Pop-ups in general are pretty bad user experience but maybe one here is justified.
Thank you!
).
- I said (and I trusted I was speaking for the whole SC usership) I’d switched to Chrome.