Feedback on Nerdseq Manual Readability - Seeking Improvement

[XORadmin]

There's the hardware and software, both huge endeavors,

Then there's the manual. It's a bottleneck, but it's also your gem in the rough.

I know you often say you don't have the time and money to put into it,
but this documentation is your most significant product.
With a device this complex and interwoven, it's everything.

To make it a less weighty document, maybe approach it as 5 or 6 discrete volumes, and don't worry about cross-indexing.
- Introduction and Overview (what's here, power and possibilities)
- Hardware Reference (Just the boards, wires and voltages and cables, nothing referring to a software release),
- Navigation Basics (getting around, the menu tree, a map, a few simple examples to try, providing positive first success)
- Menus In Depth (vols. 3a and 3b i.e. the hard stuff, but spread out, new features go here in vols. 3c, 3d...),
- Cookbook (Examples, FAQ, cheat sheets, (and please) Light Internals Overview and History of NerdSeq)

Rough copy paste sections from the current manual into separate draft volumes and see how it feels.

Condensing down the paragraphs into dense information nuggets makes the information less potent, not more.
Whitespace is free and you don't even need to make ton of tedious tables if things are just spaced out with good headings.
It's a pdf. Don't treat it like you're saving paper.

Those ADHD adjacent issues mentioned above with the documentation are there for lots of us.
I suspect it's worse that you believe it is.

The hardware is rock solid, the software teases at great functionality, but getting stuck in the mnemonic menu system,
without easy reference at hand, always frustrates me at some point, losing the ideas flow, and I have to move on.

I've got a NerdSeq, Slim Midi, video i/o, and cv board and I so, so, want to use them more,
but it always drags me in the weeds, jumping from page to page, digging for words in paragraphs.

Please fix the docs. Stop adding features, it's enough. That's done. It's great.
All of those jacks on NerdSeq hook up to other things, and I can't dedicate 80% of my focus just on NerdSeq.

You've got to make it easier so people won't be discouraged by all of the wonders you have created here.
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A part of what you describe is already like you describe it: Introduction, Overview, Basics to get started etc.
From there it is getting tricky and so far no one could come up with a better solution than what it is now. In the end you got multiple screens with each it's own functionality but much functionality can be cross-used on other screens or with other functionality. The only separation I see is the one to separate between the screens and then through the hardware and side-functionality.
If you got a better idea beside the rough sketch you came up with and without losing any functional detail, please let me know. I am always happy to improve stuff and if I need to 'refactor' anything for that then it would be fine, too. I can already tell you that nothing will change if they no concrete good and detailed proposals. I do focus on the fact that always everything is in the manual and that at the point of a new release. That is often not a thing with other products, even with ones that are much more simple.
I also do focus on adding new features and improving stuff (for free) which makes it possible that still after 7 years I can pay my bills with it. I will keep continuing that at least for a while. And probably many people wouldn't agree with you that I should stop adding features...the feature request thread is the biggest thread on the forum.
Another thing I also went through is that they have been attempts to improve and rewrite the manual by other people multiple times before. In the end it cost me money, hardware and time without any result. It is easy to say that it can be better but it is not easy to make it better. That makes me also very sceptical to give it out of hands as no one has been reliable enough before to finish it so I could continue. I have multiple of these example pages how it could look like...and I was very enthousiastic about them and it ended always with only these example pages.

Anyways, I do agree that there is room for improvements, some things could be explained in a better way and the tons of grammatical issues. I am not sure about a general restructuring. That is probably more something for someone who writes a book about the NerdSEQ rather than a functional manual.
But maybe I am also not too open for these kind of things as I am more a developer than the one who writes the manual. I enjoy developing, I don't really enjoy writing the manual, I am not a graphic, media, industrial designer who can make fancy product flyers...but still I do what I got to do.