[PD] [FM Discuss] Portuguese translation of the PD manual

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Sat Aug 14 17:54:42 CEST 2010


On Sat, 14 Aug 2010, Martin Peach wrote:

> Yes, if an external could generate its own help patch that would be 
> something.

Jonathan proposed something similar a while ago. It would not work the 
same for all externals. GridFlow externals still have their own 
method-lookup guarded every time by a universal class_addanything... 
several meta-externals (language interfaces to make externals in other 
languages) do the same kind of thing.

It can't be fully automatic, because the doc generation tools can't 
inspect an external to the point of knowing which arguments will allow it 
to be created, how that affects the number of inlets, and all the nonfirst 
inlets (or all the inlets when using CLASS_NOINLET) go through t_inlets 
that you can't necessarily find in the class-table, and if you do find 
them, you can't associate them with each other until you have seen an 
instantiated object... etc. the trouble is endless.

> The symbol table could be translated on the fly but the comment block is more 
> difficult.

Wait, do you mean the external's code would use special commands to get 
the doc generated ? We were only thinking of generating the base structure 
of the help file to be filled in.

What do you mean by "translation of the symbol table" ? from what to 
what ? (btw, the symbol table has no class pointers)

Writing all of the doc in a non-pd format would help deal with the 
ordering of the comments and the diffs, but it wouldn't help us 
integrating any pd-specific features in the doc. (you can't auto-generate 
very meaningful examples of uses of pd objects...)

I still think that *-help.pd files should be the 'source code of the 
documentation' : it should be the place where we do all the editing. But I 
wouldn't prevent someone from having their own different system where 
*-help.pd files are generated.

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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801


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