[PD] basic remarks about Pd-extended for OS X

[robbert van hulzen]

Luigi Rensinghoff <luigi.rensinghoff at freenet.de>wrote:

> 1) If it looks right to me there are 3 ways to determine paths and
> libs on OSX and i am not quite sure if i am doing something wrong or
> if it just has not been considered.
> 
> You can change the settings in the TCL-Interface of PD, but there are
> not enough lines, to see all the necessary entries, in the /Library/
> Preferences/org.puredata.plist file and vie a.pdrc file.

i've never tried the .pdrc file, but as far as i understood, it's an 'extra'
prefs file, which adds to the plist. the plist can be edited in an xml
editor like the one that's in xcode. changes made there don't necessarily
show up in the prefs as accessed through pd an vice versa in my experience,
which is inconvenient but not a real problem. for extra paths, you can also
use frank's ":" trick which is mentioned somewhere in the archives and also
on the pd site 
http://puredata.info/docs/tutorials/TipsAndTricks#add-more-entries-to-the-pa
th-and-library-dialogs.
> 
> They do not really interact, i mean if you change something in the
> pdrc file it is not written in the org.puredata.plist file, right ?
> 
> This might cause confusion to a OSX PD-Beginner right ?
> 
> 2) There are so many paths to the help-files if the doc-folder has so
> many subfolders, which is good and necessary to keep it structured,
> but that way the good-old "right-click"-help does not always work.
> And especially for beginners it is so good to be able to just browse
> through the examples or reference-files and quickly open the "help-
> files"

finding help files doesn't always work, that's right. sometimes they're
simply not there (because an object is undocumented, or because a help file
is simply missing, which was the case for [bonk~] and [fiddle~] on
pd-ext-0.39.2-test5). according to the manual (help->html) you can specify
the helppath in your startup flags.
what do you want to use
> "Aliases" or symbolic links
for in this respect?

hope this helps, cheers, robbert