And I am totally grateful for the large amount of coding that you have done. And toxy totally changed the way I thought of Pd, from application to programming platform.
As for HTML docs, I don't understand why you want to separate the patches from the text. Yes, the text formatting abilities of Pd are pretty limited, but I think its very helpful to have the text right next to the running examples, instead of having to switch back and forth between applications. The SuperCollider docs are a great example of that. With a little more work on the [comment] object, I think we could have all of the text formatting capabilities that we'd really need to make very nice, linked help patches with texts, all within Pd.
Something like Miller's book, which goes much more into the theory behind what one does with Pd, is a good example of something that works much better in a proper text format.
.hc
On Apr 30, 2005, at 11:30 AM, Krzysztof Czaja wrote:
hi Hans-Christoph,
firstly -- I am very grateful for yours and Dave's work.
Secondly, imho it is better to rethink pddp now, before adding new contents. The original idea was that pddp should provide a consistent framework for at least three kinds of media: patches, html, and ps/pdf. The choice then was to either base it on docbook, or to design a very simple custom format. The latter never materialized, and certainly never will. Hardly being a docbook fan myself, I do not see any alternative...
Anyway, the worst thing that could happen, would be having all the reference pages, and ``more info'' propaganda embedded in Pd comments. There would be no other way of putting those on other media, than many days of hard manual work. The likely result of which would be forking of the pddp source.
Let us use patches as patches, and comments as comments.
A tricky part, besides tailoring docbook styles, is deciding about a mechanism for opening patches in Pd by invoking links in a html browser. The easiest way is including a simple httpd server in pd-gui. There is a ready to use 250-liner at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/tclhttpd/tclhttpd/bin/mini/
Krzysztof
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote: ...
If anyone is interested, it'd be great if we could work together to create the style guides. The way I currently see it there are two kinds of patches "all_about_" which has lots of text and examples, and the basic help patch, which should be a reference with a link to the relevant "all_about_" pages. float-help.pd from PDDP is a decent example of a reference patch.
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As we enjoy great advantages from inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously. - Benjamin Franklin