Op woensdag 4 januari 2023 om 22:24:09 -0700 schreef Jeff Olson <jjocanoe@gmail.com>:
Here we are: with a new release, a new year. Do I hear any resolutions?
I've been impressed by how this community helps each other by referencing just the right section of a manual, and that, lately, those sections seem better written with more thorough explanations than I remember from the last time I attempted to Read-The-Full-Manual back in 2.18. Maybe now's the time to try RTFM again?
But instead of making a new year's resolution to RTFM, I resolved to make an HTML page highlighting graphically all the new and improved sections, in hopes that such a page would encourage me to broaden my occasional manual lookups into a more thorough study of the new stuff, especially in areas that already had my interest. Maybe it could even leverage my browsing history to track my progress in hitting all the new and improved sections?
Well, I'm no lilypond developer, but I did manage to cobble a perl script to compare the documentation source code between 2.24.0 and 2.22.2 to figure out what had changed the most. It then uses a modified style sheet to highlight the familiar TOC frame on the left hand side of every manual page, so all the new stuff would jump out at me (in hopes that I'd read it).
It looks like it might actually work. The result (NotationReference24-SectionChanges.html) is attached to this email, in case it could help other users.
It's a self contained, static HTML page with no scripting; just one file that can serve as your jumping off point for RTFM. Basically it's the standard TOC but with highlighting. Put it somewhere in your file system where you can double-click to open it in a browser. From there, the links all lead to the official documentation.
I'm finding it's almost like a game, targeting the big changes and automatically marking them off my list. Might even bring some fun to RTFM! Well, we'll see about that.
HTH,
Jeff