Something that should be a boon to new and intermediate Pure Data users, a wiki of Pd objects is now up.
Marius Schebella on the Pd mailing list:
At the moment we still use the address http://wiki.puredata.info, but it
should be http://www.pdpedia.org in the next [few] days/weeks. (At the moment, pdpedia.org is linked to a test site.)
The general idea of the project is to have better documentation of Pd, mainly – but not only – its object classes. I hope it will become a useful tool to search for objects and how to do things in Pd. The search field should really work as a “how do I…”
All objects have some basic information like a short description, library, categories, but we also dumped text that we found in the
help patches to give a little help for filling in content. That is the goal, to get many people involved in sharing knowledge about how to use the objects, document features, and so on.
So far, the documentation for Pd is not nearly as bad as I was warned it would be. I think the PdPedia is a great idea — all the core and extension objects documented in one comprehensive resource. The self-documentation of the program (Help patches) is quite informative, as well.
One quirk I’ve noticed is that both the mailing list and the main documentation wiki are both heavy with Quebecois. I’m glad that some of the documentation appears in French, but this also accounts for some seriously poor and distracting English in those pages, as well as some documents being impenetrable to someone who can scarcely order soup in French.
I have no explanation for this prominent Francophone Canadian presence. Interesting curiosity I suppose, though I’m still left wondering why the userbase is concentrated there. Perhaps its just a vocal Quebecois minority.
I keep forgetting to check the Cycling ‘74 docs and tutorials for Max, which I have heard are largely applicable to Pd.
Mathieu Bouchard Said:
on Sep 20, 2008 at 3:53 pm
The 2nd international Pd convention was in Montréal just a month before you wrote that. There really is a large concentration of Pd users in Montréal. There has been a school project at UQÀM for translating documentation, among dozen of projects being carried on. This is not just “vocal” (though it happened that in our Pd club we had 8 pd-list writers in the same room at the same time…). There are many projects, many authors and many sponsors. The 2nd convention happened because people in Montréal wanted it: there was literally no involvement of previous organisers.
I think it has to be accepted as a fact of life that the two most intense concentrations of Pd users are in Québec and in Steiermark. It tends to condition a fair amount of what’s going on in the Pd world. I also don’t have much of an explanation for it.