To pd dev -
I'm struggling to finish the design of a slew-limiting low-pass filter (slop~) to add to Pd vanilla to make ti easier to make dynamics processors and soft limiters (and hopefully other stuff). The usual help window scheme isn't adequate to describe how to use it, so I want to make some way to format Latex documentation and link to it from Pd help files. My current plan is:
Make Pd able to open files in the native OS (maybe via a new "pdcontrol" object that would issue system commands and be extensible to get various notifications in the future).
Put detailed, latex-compiled documentation somewhere in the Pd distro, probably in 1.manual as HTML files, but perhaps as PDFs in addition or instead.
But I don't think it's a good idea to put latex compilation in the Pd compile chain, so I _think_ the practical way to do this is to put both latex xources and HTML targets in the Pd distro. This would be ugly (having to check latex output into the git repo as if it were source) but I don't see any good way to do otherwise without making it very difficult for others to compile Pd using the autotools and/or the plain makefiles in pd/src.
For the moment I'm planning to just put an attempt at documentation for slop~ on my own page and point to it from the slop~ help file (which will require fixing Pd to be able to open URLs). But eventually I want to be able to include the full doc int eh Pd release.
Any advice would be very helpful!
cheers Miller