Re: new website: second draft

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 08:47:06PM -0500, Tim McNamara wrote:
>
> On Jun 24, 2009, at 7:47 PM, Mark Polesky wrote:
>> Also, just to respond to a previous comment, I do *NOT* think the
>> crash course is overwhelming. If we pare it down too much, it's going
>> to elicit thoughts of "can I do anything other than Twinkle Twinkle
>> Little Star?"
>
> As a recent newbie, please allow me to offer a little feedback on this:  
> the crash course is overwhelming.  IMHO the newbie crashes into the 
> bottom the the abrupt and nearly vertical learning curve presented there. 

You're not expected to understand everything in the crash course;
the point is to introduce the kind of text you'll be writing.
Skimming is totally ok.  How could we clarify this?  Add text like
"These are examples of input notation"?  Rename the page to
"Example input"?

Or perhaps omit the two orchestra examples?

> Learning to use LilyPond is like learning to use Emacs.  Lots of power, 
> which comes at the price of a bit of work to learn how to use it.  IMHO 
> most newbies should not see the crash course until after they have seen 
> the introductions in the LM.

But by the time somebody is reading the LM, the crash course is
useless.

> I plan to have a look through the LM again and make some
> suggestions for changes to the documentation that would have
> helped me get into it more quickly and easily, in hopes that
> those things would help others in the same way.  Maybe it will
> end up being the "Pre-Learning Manual Manual."

Umm, no.  If the LM doesn't explain stuff, we should fix the LM.
The LM is *the* place that we assume the reader has no previous
knowledge.


The Crash Course -- or whatever we rename it to -- is simply there
to stop people from expecting lilypond to have a GUI.  We need to
have some text in there; windows users don't understand what we
mean by "lilypond has no GUI".

Cheers,
- Graham