[PD] A bunch of revised help patches

[João Pais]

Hi,

finally I looked a bit at it. I can't say much, but a couple of things:

- this is a massive work, it's not possible to go through the patches and  
give a general opinion. Unless I do replace the pd-ext patches with these  
ones, and then in a couple of weeks might have something general to say.

- in general I think your patches should make part of Pd. Are you on it,  
or should we make a possy and go to the big man with this request?

- it seems that for your work to be worthwile, it should be part of  
Pd(-ext). but as a (small) developer, I'm not sure if your strategy is the  
best. I saw that you went into everyone's help patches and added the meta  
+ import objects (and anything more?). I have nothing against it, but the  
developers should then be the ones doing that work. Or, assuming that your  
patches make it into main Pd, the next time I update some help patch I'll  
erase your work, because "your" version isn't "my" version.
So, it might be easier to either make a small document telling the  
developers to add x and y to their patches to conform to the new pddp  
logic - and put this somewhere in the wiki for new developers to read -,  
or you send them your version of the patches, which they should take and  
build on.
Unless you want to constantly check if everyone is using the right  
objects/tags/etc.


I'll give some comments to H-C's comments:

> * think that all help patches should have the same width, but the height  
> should be adjusted to minimize white space, like with abs-help.pd

I agree. I also like fontsize 10 better than 12. but doesn't anyone  
complain?


> * I think we should make the help patches per object, not the mega-helps  
> like Miller makes (acoustics, etc.) If you want to make help patches for  
> things like mtof~, I'll make the changes in Pd-extended so that it has  
> its own help patch

with some objects might make sense, like the arythmetic ones, or the  
acoustic conversions.
But I think that mega-patches should be helpful for new people, provided  
that the individual information is also somewhere to be found.

Also, more all_about-patches can always be interesting. they act like  
programming tutorials, and can be very helpful.


Is there any specific work to be done? As said, I don't know the  
collection well enough to say something about it.

João