Collating tutorials...

For the official Cheetah3D tutorials - downloadable pdfs from the site. These will be designed in a Cheetah3D style and will all be uniform, this in my opinion is the best option in terms of speed of production and usability.

To be honest, my primary concern at this stage in time is the official tutorials.

Martin what do you think?

That sounds excellent. A uniform design is always great for learning material. But the question of which app to use is still unsolved. What apps are widely spread and usable for such a task. iWorks? Office? Or HTML and save as PDF?

Bye,
Martin
 
Hello Cheetah3D Forum,

I'm really new to this redering topic but what I could contribute to this thread about an app for doing these tutorials whould be Mellel by RedleX.
Here is a link to a tutorial about Mellel itself (7.5 mb).

Maybe that would be a good app (Mac only) to produce that tutorial as a PDF.

Cheers,
Roland
 
HTML looks the right option to me. You can use a simple text editor which are readily available for free to create your html. Also producing in HTML also gives us the option of giving each tutorial both a pdf and weblink which is even better.

I'll have a play around with setting up a template.
 
Hi,
yes I also think that a html templet would be best. OK HMTL is quite tricky to write if you've never done it.

But with copy & paste even I can fill a html templet with some nice content.:smile:

And the biggest advantage is if course that virtually everybody had a text editor to write a tutorial.

Bye,
Martin
 
Last I checked iWeb was producing fairly dreadful* html. Also, as far as I can tell, it has no collaboration tools whatsoever. Whether it's bundled with (correction: ) Leopard remains a rumor, and since there are folks here using 10.3 still it's hardly available to everyone.

I do think change tracking is vital for any collaborative stuff. E.g. if I write a tutorial and you want to proof-read and otherwise QA it, if we are using Word you can just turn on track changes and then make changes and comments and return the file to me -- I can then roll back changes I don't like (and at least see what you've done).

Google docs has the advantage that the document can be seen and edited by everyone (all you need is FireFox or IE or the current version of Safari**) and it has some change tracking (and a comment system and live chat -- so if we're both on at the same time we can IM each other while the document is open).

* Dreadful of course is subjective. Objectively, it produces big, heavy pages (you can switch off all the graphics but it's extra work), it makes a lot of fairly heavy-handed use of CSS (using spans and spot styles rather than consistent stylesheets), and renders inconsistently in browsers.
** The version of Safari Apple pushes out to you is deficient in its support for interactive styled text editing. I believe you can download the nightly builds of webkit and install them yourself and get the Safari functionality from Leopard ahead of time. I just use FireFox.
 
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Bump!

Anything happening here? May I make a simple, positive suggestion?

Let's put a sticky topic at the head of this forum where the first post is an organized list of good tutorials with direct links to the thread, web page, etc. That way if we ever do sort out the admin issues we'll have a good place to start. Anyone with suggestions for the list can post to the sticky and the person who owns the sticky can amend it when they get a chance.
 
Hi all-

I'm new here. I just purchased the 3D 4.1 version and I was looking for tutorials on how to use the new animation features. I have turned up some great tutorials so far, thanks to all, and I noticed this collation suggestion, and I think that is a great idea. It's tough to unearth pertinent tutorials in the forum.

I saw that .pdf files were discussed as a format. The mac .rtfd works well for this type of thing while a tutorial is being developed because they are easy to update and improve, then you can turn them into .pdf.
Plus if you are using this program, you already have that text editor.

Thanks,
G.
 
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The problem with rtfd is that Text Edit really sucks to write documents in (I don't know if Apple intentionally crippled it or what... it has all the features a decent word-processor needs (er... except sections, tables, headers, footers, table of contents, footnotes, indexes, and change tracking) but the UI for them (e.g. customizing styles) is atrocious. Also bear in mind that quite a few tutorials feature QuickTime movies (which kind of wrecks both .pdf and any word-processor from contention).

I note that the new phpbb allows inline attachments. Hopefully the commercial forum software that is used here will follow suit which, together with allowing more attachments per post, would make it easier to build tutorials directly in the forum.
 
Well, actually, I rather like textedit. It is a nice app for writing, if I don't need a whole lot of complex features, it saves startup time, and it's a really nice little app. BTW, it does have tables. Try Format>Text>Table…:cool:
 
So it does! Apple really needs to clean up its UI.

I'd still like to see a simple list of tutorials set up as a sticky.
 
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