[PD] style guide idea: [send foo] versus [; foo(
Martin Peach
martin.peach at sympatico.ca
Sat Mar 21 19:19:23 CET 2009
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 cords
>> well, 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:
>
> 1) avoid crossings
>
> 2) if that doesn't work, then try to avoid patch cords crossing over
> objects, i.e. prefer cords crossing other cords only
>
> 3) 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)
>
> 4) 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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: adsr_cleaned.PNG
Type: image/png
Size: 41188 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/attachments/20090321/7ef2ad1b/attachment.png>
More information about the Pd-list
mailing list