----- Original Message -----
From: Pierre-Olivier Boulant po.boulant@free.fr To: Ed Kelly morph_2016@yahoo.co.uk Cc: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com; Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at; Pd List pd-list@iem.at Sent: Saturday, January 5, 2013 5:46 AM Subject: Re: [PD] translate the Start Here! page
On 05/01/2013 02:47, Ed Kelly wrote:
Also notice that neither you nor I are the least bit interested in
fixing these
problems in the FLOSS manual, and we're especially not interested
in taking
it on as a long term project. Who does that leave? If it leaves
anyone
wouldn't their time be better spent fixing the doc problems listed
on the
tracker than etching in stone a description of a moving target?
Well, if you have to teach Pd to art students who are used to using
Photoshop and Final Cut Pro (as I do) the FLOSS manual page is very useful to give them some idea of what the objects are. It may not be 100% accurate, but at least it is (only) a start. I do hope that the search mechanism replaces static docs conceptually, but here is why they should be kept.
Learning Pd from scratch is not easy unless you are already a computer
scientist. "How do I know what the objects are called" is I agree, the wrong question in so many ways. However, 80% of my undergraduate students basically give up at that point if they can't find the answer, and probably 60% of my masters students, often after saying "I hate Pd". This question usually comes up in the first lesson. I could criticise them for this, except that there is an impression that Pd is "open" as well as open-source. Is it? Or is it highly elitist? I think it can be both, but I don't want to kick away the ladder...
Perhaps the problem lies more with "standards" for documentation
across the whole community - it's never going to happen (remember Pdpedia?) because the Pd community can be somewhat anarchic. Hats off to Hans - making Pd-extended work is like nailing jelly to the wall I guess.
There are some small things we could do. For example, a description of what
lies in each folder of externals and what they are for may well be enough, followed by a list of objects. My students are _scared_ of Pd because it is so utterly different to anything else they have ever engaged with. A bit of documentation that isn't in Pd itself eases the pain somewhat.
A static web page will never be up-to-date since the pd externals folder is
always a moving target. But it is better than nothing. It was really hard persuading students to learn Pd when Flossmanuals didn't exist. It's still hard, but it does open some doors to my students.
Ed
-Jonathan
.hc
I agree this is something useful despite all that has been said. It's not perfect or up to date, but it's really better than nothing. It is also a bit easier to access for non-English speakers since you can translate theses lists (not the object names - yet ;) )
But it's the Pd FLOSS manual object list-- and only that-- which I'm addressing. If it's not yet translated then it is _worse_ than using the search plugin, because it leaves out info about which objects belong to which libraries and is already out of date as to which objects are in Pd extended.
Please spend as much time as you want/can to maintain everything else in the Pd FLOSS manual, and please spend zero time "improving" the big out-of-date object list because that's time better spent working on the actual Pd documentation. Look at anything in the tracker that includes the word "documentation":
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=55736&atid=478070&source=na...
But Search and help-patches are limited to English for the moment.
Search has already been translated to a couple of languages.
-Jonathan
pob