[PD] teaching PD to newbies [WAS: Re: [GEM] GEM users request ]

[chris clepper]

>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
>