Meta - Discussion

Page for general discussion of qtractor documentation creation.

We can use the comment section below for threaded discussion, and any useful guidelines that arise from discussion can be listed on this page:

• Prefix new manual page titles with "Manual - "

• Prefix new how-to page titles with "How To - "

• When a page is renamed, references to previous name do not get magically adjusted.

• Be careful about changing the section names and numbers in the manual, since they function as anchors for references.

• "How To" pages can serve as answers to the first questions a new user is likely to have, and can link to manual sections for further reading.

Some things that probably need to be done:

• Someone who is familiar with building and using the VST features should probably check to see if the information about that is still correct.

• The illustrations should probably be checked to see if they need updating.

• The language could probably be made more compact, concise, etc.

[junkyardsparkle]

Should we keep the appendix with the print-style references in it, or is it enough to add the references as links within the text (which I've done)? I think these can be extracted back to numbered references by software if somebody really wants to print a paper manual.

[yubatake]

Now that it's possible to export multiple buses, I've added this information (along with various other bits) to the Overview page. On this:

1) The feature is not yet in "official" releases (only recent svn). Are you OK with having the info in, or should I leave it out for now?
2) The Export Audio screenshot is now out of date. I can upload a new one, but it won't match yours. How would you like to handle this?

[Rui Nuno Capela]

thanks, you can of course do as you tell.

re. screenshot don't bother wether it matches mine (original wasn't mine anyway:))

[yubatake]

OK, have inserted the new screen and left the old file attached (but not inserted), just in case.

[yubatake]

I've just updated the section on Automation in the manual with some information I've recently learnt. However, I'm not sure what the overall plan is for the documentation: is it to have both a user manual (there are currently more than one) and a wiki? Or is the plan to copy across the content of the manual(s) to the wiki and make the wiki the "definitive version"?

I've only been updating the wiki up to now, but as it doesn't yet include the Automation section, I've updated the relevant section in the manual instead. If this is incorrect, please let me know.

[yubatake]

As per the above post, I'm still not sure how this is supposed to work, but, in any case, I've updated the wiki with this automation info, as there was no such section there. Again, if this is incorrect/not needed, please let me know.

[Rui Nuno Capela]

having the time and patience for this endeavour is always, imnsho. priceless ;)

let me say that anyones POV and yours especially is more than correct. more than needed. it's thankyou again.

cheers

[yubatake]

Thanks for the confirmation/encouragement :-) In that case, I'll continue to update the wiki whenever I discover new things and if I notice anything clearly missing, but which is in the manual, I'll copy it across.

[junkyardsparkle]

The vague idea I had when initially populating the wiki was to wikify the content of the nicely structured (but outdated) pdf manual, and then to update the wiki version, possibly using the other, more recent (but less coherent) materials as a reference. The wiki would then be the (hopefully up-to-date) base document from which other document formats could be produced on-demand (there's a very ugly proof-of-concept script posted somewhere around here for scraping the wiki pages into structured html pages suitable for importing into document software). That said, I don't have much more to contribute, not being very up-to-date on recent features myself, so it's pretty much up to you and any other contributors to decide how to do things moving forward. :)

[yubatake]

Thanks for the info. Making the wiki the "base document" sounds good to me too.

I'll probably also remove the Illustration numbers to make it easier to add new ones (it'll avoid having to shift the numbering of all later illustrations, then hunt around for links and update them all). It won't be perfect, but I think it'll be better.

[Rui Nuno Capela]

hi everyone,

hell yes, after a very long time, almost as taken into forever deeps and back, i got something working in this topic, finally: somewhat automated the conversion of the whole or part of the online sf.net/p/qtractor/wiki into an epub [1] and guess what, plain html [2].

check this out:
1. Qtractor Manual & How To's: [epub] [pdf]
2. Qtractor Wiki Home: [html]

please let me know what you think of this.

[UPDATE:] currently based on wiki+attachments export of qtractor-backup-2017-03-05-214724 and the epub/pdf are time-stamped as 2017-03-05 22:10+0000.

cheers

ps. see also http://www.rncbc.org/drupal/comment/7382#comment-7382 onwards.