Re: Essay status

[Andrew Hawryluk]

On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 06:18:13PM +0100, John Mandereau wrote:
>> What's the completion status of the essay?  Are at least some chapters
>> stabilized enough so that they can be translated, reusing translations
>> of former Chapter 1 Introduction of the Learning Manual and the Essay on
>> the old website?  I can't figure it out myself from Git history.

Probably not stable enough to translate, but getting close. (I'm
assuming that the translators would not want any changes to the
English version once they start, correct me if I'm wrong.)

The first two-thirds of the text are nearly stable from my point of
view. I have just a few tiny edits to make and it will be ready to ask
for complaints from the user list one last time.

The last third is basically untouched and covers issues of LilyPond
architecture and input format. I have to do some thinking about which
of this content is out of date or better presented in the newer
sections of the Learning Guide or the website. So this may change
substantially.

That said, I have only been reading the PDF output as I worked, so the
HTML version is still a formatting disaster. (I have tried to include
the highest resolution images I could for the PDF version, so the web
version needs another complete set of images at screen width. Maybe
865 px wide like the LilyPond snippets?) So I expect that lots of the
image files will still change and I can't say if other formatting
tweaks will show up in the .itely file.

> We believe that the "new" essay material has superceeded the old
> essay.  We're not certain, though, and I'm not certain how much of
> the old stuff I've removed.  I deliberately didn't delete the
> files, but I forget whether essay.tely still includes them.

True. All the files are still there but none of the old material is
included in the output anymore. On the engraving topics, I feel that
all of the best material has been retained, with the possible
exception of the 2.1 benchmarking example, where I can't find a PDF
version of the output. On the program architecture topics I can't
really say yet.

> It's definitely not ready for translators.  But I'm pretty certain
> that when the time comes, translating from scratch will be the way
> to go.

Yes. The parts that have been stolen from the earlier versions are
mixed in so finely that they would be pretty hard to identify. If I
were using my poor foreign language skills to translate, I would read
through the old Spanish essay to get warmed up, but I would start with
an empty file.

Thanks for checking on this. Heckling encouraged! I hope to make some
more progress next week.

Andrew