Re: lilypond manual intro

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi Karl,

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> Ok, I go there (http://lilypond.org/website/text-input.html).  And the
> example looks quite complex, what with numerous colors, arrows, etc.,
> etc.  Not what I want to show my mom.

I'd make these examples simpler, too.  But i guess we should wait with
that until the first round of GLISS is finished - for example, we may
decide to use english note names by default (instead/in addition to
dutch).

> I totally understand the goodness and desirability of \relative.  I only
> question whether it is the absolute first (well, second) thing to tell
> people about.  As that page itself says: "Relative mode can be confusing
> initially".  I completely agree.

I think that \relative would be better explained by a picture with
arrowed explanations instead of the lengthy text description beginning
with "Relative mode can be confusing initially".

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 9:06 PM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 06:20:09PM +0100, Trevor Daniels wrote:
>>
>> Karl Berry wrote Friday, September 07, 2012 11:45 PM
>> > The first example there looks good (and is in fact what I sent her).
>> > But then the second example, instead of showing how to typeset other
>> > kinds of notation, goes into \relative.  Is this really the next thing
>> > people want from a tutorial?  I would have expected to see how to choose
>> > a different clef or time signature or type of note or ... anything but
>> > that.
>>
>> Again, a reasonable point to make, but as pretty well all the following
>> examples are in relative mode and as this is usually the best one for
>> beginners to use it seemed best to get this out of the way early, rather
>> than teaching absolute entry only to ditch it a few pages later.
>
> Yes.  If anything, I think we should consider making the very
> first example \relative.

The question is: how do you introduce \relative without describing
absolute first?  The first reference pitch for \relative has to be
written in absolute.
I was banging my head against the wall here when i was writing short
Lily course (4 pages) for my fellow choir members.

> (I'd also like to have an \absolute keyword so that doc examples
> using it could be more explicit,

+11!

> http://lilypond.org/doc/stable/Documentation/learning/index
> "redirects" to
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/learning/index
> The same is true of
> http://lilypond.org/doc/stable/

wow!  we really do have these!  How come i didn't know about them??
I think it would be great to use these more often and encourage people
to use them.  I vaguely remember cases of users looking at too old
documentation.

cheers & thanks for suggestions,
Janek