!subnode Preface
!ignore_links

Welcome to UDO!

You are reading the revised documentation of the revised program called UDO
written by a quite overworked author that still is hoping that anybody
outside there understands his quite unrevised knowledge of writing English
documentations.

UDO is a powerful and multipurpose utility for making a documentation or any
other text file that is needed in one text format or more. Though UDO is
powerful it's quite easy to understand and to use.

If you take a look at the size of this documentation you will notice
immediately that UDO has to be quite powerful. Many users get deterred of
the size of this documentation and try to use UDO without having read it.
Unfortunately, exactly these people will ask lots of questions later on
without knowing that their questions could be answered by simply reading
this documentation.

Due to this fact I want to note at the beginning of this documentation that
you will only be able to use UDO in an efficient way if you read the
complete documentation one time at least and if you experiment with the
added examples.

Please take some time, sit down, take a cup of tea or coffee and read this
documentation from the beginning to the end. You don't have to learn
everything by heart but you should be able to find things quickly if there
will be questions later on.

If you will detect parts where things are described in a too short, wrong or
misleading way: please let me know! UDO is ""my little baby"" and it
wouldn't be the first time that an author has forgotten to describe some
important parts.

And if you have any problems with my English: please let me know, too! I did
what I can but you without any doubts you will find some awful parts.

I hope that UDO will become an unrenounceable utility for you and you will
have more time for the really important things.

!raw [tex] \vfill

Dirk Hagedorn

Sundern, December 10th 1996

P.S.: UDO is Open Source since October 2001. To get the current version of
UDO and this documentation visit (!url [http://www.udo-open-source.de] []).
