Re: Real news (was: gtk2 news)

[Stephen Wilhelm <swilhelm theriver com>]

On Tue, 2002-10-15 at 07:31, D vid wrote:
> On 10 Oct 2002 19:58:53 -0700
> Stephen Wilhelm <swilhelm theriver com> wrote:
> > An interesting use for the tutorial that I had never envisioned.  I am
> > constantly amazed at how popular it has become.
> It's always the same . But i can see no surprising fact here considering the tutorial is the concentration 
> of a good amount of very neat work .

Thanks.  I've tried as best I can.

> > I probably won't have the time to help out with the port, but I am
> > working on a new version of the tutorial.  Mostly I've been reorganizing
> > it (the old one was a little long to be properly called a tutorial).
> I'm nobody on this list to tell what to do , i am just giving my opinion : according to me , there is not a 
> single line to withdraw from your tutorial ( rather there could be some to add ... ) . If your tutorial is 
> so popular , it's because it's exactly what people expect when they need and want a step by step 
> explanation . And it's something that's hardly found in the open source community who is enamoured with the 
> very strict and sometimes inaccurate man pages .
> ( By the way , i'm not complaining , i'm just giving the point of view of a non professionnal computer user 
> , an eternal beginner ;-) .

Withdraw?  Who said anything about withdrawing?  :)

Mostly what I want to do is create an actual tutorial to put at the
beginning.  It dawned on me that 377 pages was a bit long for something
advertised as just a "tutorial".  So, I'm creating a brief tutorial
discussing topics such as widgets, how to create and use them, basic
containers, signals and events, and so on.  Then I want a reference
section for each widget (trust me, this will be better than it is now),
complete with examples (time permitting I want some that are more
complete than the current ones).  Finally, (and something that I should
have done by now) would be subjects like drag-and-drop, styles, and a
few of the more advanced topics (the main reason I've not done them is
the same reason that no Gnome widgets are documented - because I don't
know much about them).  I also want one or two largish programs that
show off a lot of Gtk-Perls features.  And I'll stop calling the whole
thing a tutorial.  Working title is _Programming Gtk-Perl_ though
_Steve's Book_ has a nice ring to it.  :)

I've also been making changes behind the scenes.  This time I'm going to
use pure XML Docbook, rather than a hybrid of SGML plus my own tags that
I run through a preprocessor, and then run through a postprocessor. 
I've also done a lot of work on XSL stylesheets (the HTML ones anyway, I
can't get PDF to work at all) and this should make it easier for me in
the long run.

And who knows?  If I do a nice job I might just be able to get it
published.  The HTML version is my first priority, but I'd jump all over
an opportunity like that.  :)


-- 
Stephen Wilhelm
    See my Gtk-Perl Tutorial:
    http://personal.riverusers.com/~swilhelm/gtkperl-tutorial/