Fantastic idea,
I will be working on a few tutorials myself soon.
I suppose we should design a template for tutorials to keep things standard,
anyone with documentation experience have any suggestions? an initial thought would be following Chris's format with html plus example patches...
Here are some of my reasonings for using html:
- html is a widely used standard
- web browsers are very common (some are even part of the OS...)
- html is very easy to browse and organize
- it's printer friendly
- no need for special software to write html just a text editor
- easy to link to the content of the tutorials rather than a binary
download (which will be offered too)
- modular design, just like pd ;)
- easy to update
the format of the info might not be the best right now, but i think tutorials should have working example patches for illustrative purposes. someone could write a tutorial that had the user write the patch as part of the tutorial, but i would still include a 'solution' patch in case the user had trouble building their own version.
also, i picked the subpatch style of presenting concepts and techniques because of the modular nature which allows for easy reuse of the examples. this might help users get going building their own patches. i think it cuts down on the visual clutter of large pd patches as well.
i'm not sure if the pics of the patches above the paragraph descriptions are the best way to present the content of the patches in the tutorial. it does introduce a potential problem where the tutorial is less useful if the .jpg files are not in the right place or missing. to make this less problematic, i plan to gzip the tutorial when it's more complete.
any suggestions about the format are welcome, and if someone wants to design a new, better format please do!
cgc
Ben