Handbook home stretch!

• Dec 9, 2022 - 20:53

With a release candidate now in the books, we're obviously getting close to seeing MuseScore 4 for real. The generic main page of the Handbook (https://musescore.org/handbook) was recently flipped over the point to MuseScore 3 (although the Support / Handbook menu above still goes to 3 for now), the Help menu in MuseScore should also start pointing to the MsueScore 4 handbook.

We've got quite a few pages complete and reviewed, with others "more or less" done. Still a handful of pages to go - including some I'm on board for, some that still need to be done by the core team.

If anyone wants to come on to help with the few empty pages we have, we're still accepting help! See the "Editing the Handbook" page in the Handbook itself for more info, also the spreadsheet at:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SBlekCrN8CAYokinRjVWMOYR4UA4_6Q…

Pages marked with an "X" in the second column are ones left to do that aren't already spoken for.

Also, a few changes to be aware of:

  • For menus, we've decided to use bold type - as in, __File→Open__ (rendering as File→Open) - instead of those ghastly "samp" tags rendering with the monospaced font. I've gone through the first couple of chapters and updated them. We can update the others as we go along.
  • I'm probably changing the names of some of the pages in Formatting that I'm working on. Shouldn't affect anything unless there are links to these pages and you want to update the "title" (the node number will not change. Let me know if you recall adding links to these somewhere and I can go in and update them when the time comes.

Comments

I can do some more - been busy with music :-) I'll change the Menu format in the pages where I'm listed as primary contributor. Might be worth noting in the spreadsheet if the pages have been "menu-fixed"

I thing I find lacking in the MS4 handbook is the extended index page. I agree that the new chapter based approach seems nicer, but one of the nice things of the longer listing for v3 was that I could quickly Ctrl+F on the index page to find the correct sub-item.

Currently for example, I wouldn't know where to go look for "lines" in the MS4 handbook.

I'm not saying that this long page listing should be on the index page again; but perhaps it could be a separate appendix page that in turn then is linked from it?

In reply to by jeetee

Right now I don't think there is an automatic way to generate this on the fly. There's been discussion of this but o far no resources to implement it. Meanwhile, I have created a script that can generate a snapshot in a couple of different formats. When the dust settles a bit more, I can run it to create a fuller TOC that reflect the state of the Handbook at the time the script is run. And then try to update it periodically.

In reply to by geetar

I had put out a request for clarification on this from the design team but haven't heard back yet - everyone's on vacation I think. I'm completely ambivalent about this. What do you think? For consistency I am fine with it, but the existing tags do a decent enough job of mimicking the look of a button.

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