^TI^About Tch (Alpha version 0.1)
^P^
This online documentation is 
an attempt to make 
^I^Tcl/Tk
 easier to work with, especially for 
beginners; John Ousterhout and his team have put together documentation 
which is clear, thorough, and unambiguous, but I think that many people 
(myself included) wish for something better than man pages, whether 
printed or electronic. This project is also my attempt to (perhaps) get 
a foot in the door so that I can eventually make some sort of living 
programming neat Tcl/Tk tools. Yes, that's right, at some point in the 
future, I hope to have a version of this polished and complete enough 
to ask money for it--something's got to pay for all those macaroni and 
cheese dinners.
^P^
This particular release (Alpha 0.1) is being made in an attempt to elicit 
feedback from 
^I^you
, valued user. It will contain many errors and be incomplete 
in many ways and in many places. Still, I hope that you'll provide me 
with feedback on the following points:
^P^
1) Do you like the user interface? Do you have any suggestions for 
improving it? 
^B^Note:
 Almost all the documentation is for Tcl, but the 
^B^text
 command from Tk is pretty thoroughly documented, and I'd appreciate 
it if you'd take a look at that, to judge how my interface works in the 
more option-laden world of Tk.
^P^
2) Did you find any bugs? If so, can you tell me (in as much detail as 
possible) how to reproduce the problem? Bugs include obvious errors, of 
course, but I also classify memory leaks, seriously unclear user interface 
features, and performance problems as bugs. (The performance aspect is 
of particular interest--I'm implementing this on a 90MHz Pentium, but 
would like it to run acceptably fast at least down to a 486/DX2 or 
equivalent. Please tell me what you think.)
^P^
3) Did you find any incorrect descriptions of commands/options/etc? 
(This doesn't include incomplete sections--there are many such, but 
fewer every day . . .)
^P^
4) Can you suggest any other major features (except keyword searching, which 
is already in the works) you believe would be of significant value to 
a majority of the Tcl/Tk programming community?
^P^
5) MOST IMPORTANTLY, would you, or your company, be willing (truly and 
honestly) to pay money for a polished and complete version of this 
program? I intend that the first release version will document all of Tcl/Tk, 
provide easy keyword access, and perhaps have a few other goodies. 
However, in order to convince myself that I'm not simply prolonging 
death by starvation, it'd be really great to find out that people were 
willing to pay (and if so, how much...)
^P^
There are a few problems you don't have to point out to me:
^P^
a) 
^I^Spelling/grammatical/punctuation/typeface errors
; they're everywhere, 
but in the process of being cleaned up.
^P^
b) 
^I^Incomplete descriptions or documentation
; I temporarily put off some of the more complex sections.
^P^
Aside from the above-mentioned exceptions, please mail bug reports or 
suggestions to 
^B^mcdonald@cs.sfu.ca
.
^P^
Finally, I'd like to express my thanks to John Ousterhout and the people at 
SUN, not only for coming up with Tcl/Tk, but also for allowing people like 
myself to freely use the Tcl/Tk man pages in their own products. I've 
rewritten a significant part of the documentation to make more effective 
use of an "active" interface, and intend to rewrite all of it by some 
point--but, without this first start from the provided man pages, it 
would've been much longer (if ever) before you saw this alpha release.
