Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Frank Barknecht wrote:
For example I'd rather start with making people properly left-align
their patches and avoid crossing patch cordswell, I do my best to reduce the number of crossings, but if I have to
avoid crossings completely, I'll just avoid Pd...Pd doesn't make it easy to avoid crossings.
Not all crossings are even bad. Crossings that are ambiguous-looking are
very bad. Too many crossings in the same area is bad, except if the
crossings are very regular-looking (a line crossing a bunch of parallel
lines is more orderly than a line crossing a bunch of random-angled
lines).Yeah, lets not turn a style guide into a style law.
Sometimes crossings are not avoidable indeed. You also have to weight crossings against other layout questions, like preferring straight vertical lines and left-alignment. I think, when laying out my patches I seem to go like that:
avoid crossings
if that doesn't work, then try to avoid patch cords crossing over objects, i.e. prefer cords crossing other cords only
if you really have to cross over objects, make the patch cords go in straight vertical lines (straight vertical cords are the best cords anyway)
even then avoid crossing over object inlets or outlets, as it is ambiguous which cords are connected.
It's a fun exercise for some kinds of mind to make all the non-vertical lines either horizontal or 45 degrees, as in the attached screen grab. It's a bit like the map-colouring-using-only-4-colours problem, proving if it's always possible to do this. The patches often end up using more surface area though. (It doesn't work so well if the lines are anti-aliased, as it's too hard to tell if they are really aligned modulo 45 degrees)
Martin
