Re: tutorial and relative

[Graham Percival]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
>   * have a very gentle entry introducing only one concept at a time

Agreed.

>   * have learnful examples that clearly show the most interesting thing,
>     but not necessarily ready-to-copy (and we introduced clickable-ly's
>     for that

I disagree somewhat, and the recent flurry of user support (and _no_ 
dissenting voices!) have pushed my position to disagreeing strongly.  We 
should have ready-to-copy snippets in at least the first few sections of 
the tutorial.

>   * use more complete and interesting examples lateron to explain
>     several related concepts

Maybe, maybe not.  I'd have to judge those on an individual basis.

>   * explain only what needs to be explained to understand the tutorial,
>     the complete story read a bit differently and read by advanced
>     users

If I understand you correctly, then yes.  The tutorial may gloss over 
some issues; the Notation chapters explain all the details.

>   * only tell novices about relative mode, because that is what you'll
>     use anyway (apropos: we have made several attempts to make \relative
>     the default, and introduce an \absolute keyword/mode for expert
>     use, eg algorithmic composition.  we still may make this switch
>     when we see a clean possibility for doing this)

!!!
That's the first I've heard about this.  I wanted to avoid introducing 
\relative mode in the early stages, since it's more complicated that 
absolute pitches.

Hmm... actually, this could work.  I'd like to hear from other people, 
too: should the tutorial *only* discuss \relative ?  It would be quite 
nice if we could tell people "unless otherwise specified, all examples 
in the notation manual are implicitly inside".

\relative c' {
%%% printed text
}

(as for a clean possibility to change this: if we make the next release 
3.0, we don't need to worry so much about breaking people's files :)

Cheers,
- Graham