Re: How do new users feel about LilyPond's documentation?

[Urs Liska]

Am 22.04.2015 um 22:05 schrieb tisimst:

Larry,

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 1:43 PM, Larry Kent-2 [via Lilypond] <[hidden email]> wrote:

My problem is that too much of it is written like the following response from Elaine, which looks like Pprogrammers Only Need Apply. 

I get frustrated when I'm looking for something to answer the question "How do I ..."

This is exactly why I posed the questions. I keep feeling like it would be super helpful to have a section (in or out of the official docs) that uses verbiage like this. Not sure what that would look like and what the restrictions would be for choosing to put content there or not. Either way, having something that is sooooo obvious (with as few clicks as possible) to describe how to do many of the most common tasks seems like a useful thing for new users. Some examples:

"How do I change the input language to English?"

"How do I add a slur?" 

"How do I adjust the page margins?"

"How do I add another voice?"

"How do I change the tempo?"

"How do I add an articulation?"

"How do I add an instrument?"

"How do I change the size of a staff?"

"How do I group instruments together?"

"How do I import a MusicXML file?"

"How do I change the angle of a beam?"

"How do I create a tuplet?"

"How do I add the closing barline?"

etc.

I think the questions need to be oriented to the language that GUI users are used to using (like "How do I add an instrument?", even though LilyPond doesn't deal with instruments in the same way as the GUI programs). This should provide a good transition to understanding more how LilyPond thinks about (and expects) the input syntax.

Just thinking out loud...

This is exactly what we intended with the "tutorials" category on Scores of Beauty (http://lilypondblog.org/category/using-lilypond/tutorials/). As it stands also these are too much oriented towards the more complicated matters - but thsi is also due to lack of external input.
I've said several times (although it could probably be repeated more often) that I'd be happy if everybody who learns something (like the above issues) through help on the mailing lists would read a short tutorial post about it we would get a nice collection of FAQs.

I still think this would be a worthwile effort if we'd have more people contributing to that. If we were to have more content it would be a viable approach to create a website around it, something like a commented index pointing to the posts. And, it would be possible to sketch that "book".

Urs

- Abraham

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