Call for gallery examples and tutorials!

[Brent Yorgey]

Hi all, things are coming along slowly but surely for an 0.7 release
sometime soon. I've put up a current working version of the updated
website here:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~byorgey/diagrams/

Any feedback is welcome.

I thought I'd also take the opportunity to put out a general call for
two things:

1. It would be lovely to add more examples to the gallery [1]. Have
any nice examples lying around? You can either just send me the
code, or even better submit a pull request---all you have to do
is add your .lhs file to the web/gallery directory in the
diagrams-doc repository, following a simple format (which you can
easily pick up using the other gallery entries as examples).

2. In an effort to take some of the pressure off the (rather
monolithic) user manual, and invite more contributions, I've
streamlined the organization and build system to make it easy to
add new tutorials to the website, which have syntax highlighting,
inline diagrams, and so on. To see how to write one, take a look
at the tutorial meta-tutorial [2]. Tutorials don't have to be
long---in fact, shorter is probably better! For example, if you
have some diagram that you've constructed using some interesting
techniques, simply walking through the code to explain it might
make for a nice tutorial. A collection of "exercises" or
"challenges"---diagrams without the source code displayed, which
the user has to try to duplicate---could also make a nice
tutorial. Really, *anything* which might teach something to
users of diagrams is fair game!

-Brent

[1] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~byorgey/diagrams/gallery.html
[2] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~byorgey/diagrams/doc/tutorials.html

[Tillmann Vogt]

Hi,

I made a Unix Poster last year. The final result is a 4MB PDF that takes
several seconds to load in Adobes Reader:
https://github.com/tkvogt/unixPoster/blob/master/unixposter.pdf
https://github.com/tkvogt/unixPoster
The source file is 65KB. The executable is huge (~60MB), and running it
can take up to a minute.
I wasn't sure if I should make it public because it clearly shows that I
had to much time. But I was assigned to this task while waiting for a
placement at a client and I could use whatever I want to make the
diagram. A colleague helped me with the content.

Obviously most of the file size comes from the text. As the text does
not have to be fancy shaded it could be passed through to at least the
SVG-Backend, instead of having this enormous amount of bezier curves.

-Tillmann

[Brent Yorgey]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 02:07:50PM +0200, Tillmann Vogt wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I made a Unix Poster last year. The final result is a 4MB PDF that
> takes several seconds to load in Adobes Reader:
> https://github.com/tkvogt/unixPoster/blob/master/unixposter.pdf
> https://github.com/tkvogt/unixPoster
> The source file is 65KB. The executable is huge (~60MB), and running
> it can take up to a minute.
> I wasn't sure if I should make it public because it clearly shows
> that I had to much time. But I was assigned to this task while
> waiting for a placement at a client and I could use whatever I want
> to make the diagram. A colleague helped me with the content.
>
> Obviously most of the file size comes from the text. As the text does
> not have to be fancy shaded it could be passed through to at least
> the SVG-Backend, instead of having this enormous amount of bezier
> curves.

Wow, this is super cool! It also makes for a nice benchmark next time
I try to do some optimization. Obviously it's too big to include in
the gallery but I will add a link to it from the website (assuming
that's OK with you).

-Brent