oops, and my nice template was for nothing then :( The new help patches have a "help-" prefix. so we'd have to rename them to help-whatever.pd
You took a look at the template, by chance ? I think people are accostumed to change close the help patches after looking at them.
i had a look and i like it. the only question is have multiple gemwins trying to go at once. apart from the potential confusion, is it stable? maybe we should stress test about a dozen of these going at once to find out.
I think that some of the help patches can take the role of the simple examples in the future. Would be nice if the examples would be more in a tutorial style, like the the once that are included with pd.
i agree with the help file as an example file, but not with the tutorial approach. one of the big problems i have with the pd tutorials (and pd in general) is how cluttered the patches get. some of those example/tutorial patches are total cluster-fuck style that are difficult to read and nearly impossible to follow (the fft ones in particular). that's why my approach was to separate the patch from the text in such a way that it aids usability of the patch and still makes the doc's text clear. hopefully the correlation between what the text is referring to in the patch is helped by the inclusion of the images of the patch contents. i haven't gotten very much in-depth feedback on the approach.
another thing about my tutorial style was designing it so that the text could elucidate various theoretical and conceptual issues, which would be unwieldy to do in the patch itself. i also feel that the modular approach to the patches makes them easier to comprehend, more useful to pick apart, and demonstrates one of the inherent strengths of pd.
cgc
Guenter