Cinelerra documentation plan

 Documentation is a big problem.  There are many incomplete wiki's for different forks.  With so few users, there's little value in having another document.  Lions simply aren't going to be alive long enough to need a manual themselves.

Lions have been making videos for the last few years to document just the changes. There have been 18 videos since 2014.  They only got a few views & it's very slow to get information from a video.  

The texinfo documentation from many years ago is pretty unsatisfying.  It's all in 1 big file but could be split up.  It looks like some forks just copied it & converted it to latex.

 https://cinelerra-gg.org/download/CinelerraGG_Manual/About_this_document.html

https://git.cinelerra-gg.org/git/?p=goodguy/cin-manual-latex.git;a=tree

 The big problem with this is it's not searchable.

The texinfo document was a kind of foreshadowing of what was to come.  Lions preferred minimal solutions from the beginning.  Young lion used texinfo instead of latex because it was much simpler to program.

Texinfo can generate a single html page or multiple pages.  The advantage with a single page is it's easy to search.  The disadvantage is forget about a scrollbar.

Wikis hosted the vast majority of documentation in the last 20 years. The problems are they require a server, the data is in an SQL database which you can't download. There's no practical way to transfer to another server or access the data without the server.  Different wiki servers have different formats for their database.  Sourceforge, which Cinelerra was hosted on from the beginning, got a user wiki feature long ago.

The documentation is quite out of date.  Some bits like Video Scope seem pretty recent.  Not sure what to do about features which were dropped.

Texinfo has a very fragile heirarchy system.

@chapter -> @section -> @subsection -> @subsubsection

There are only 4 heirarchy levels.  You have to remember what level of the heirarchy the current text is in.  It can't automatically determine the heirarchy from tabs, brackets, or a common keyword.  Menu items need to have :: double colons or it'll print an error.  The sections need to be in the same order they're listed in the menus or it'll print warnings.

There is no modern image support in texinfo.  It only inlines images without scaling.   There's no way to link thumbnails to full size versions.  There is no caption support.  In a single page document, loading all the images in their full size is going to be super slow. The best option might be a post processor which scales all the inline images based on a table & creates links to the original images.

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Where it all began, Utah 1995.  Previously $1.  Now $1.50.  Just 1/3 of a can & noodles was a feast in the old days but lions also ate 3 meals per day then & didn't exercise at all & the cans were 32oz instead of 24.  Wally still sells a lot of it, despite the fact that it only has a small space below all the $3 Prego.  Plain Hunt is still viable when adding meat & boiled down.  Prego is a bit too much food when adding meat.

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11 years later, the RH-5M's right speaker died again.  Since the headphone connector is on the left, the right cable is getting more strain.  It's always breaking in the knot.  The foam covers are also perishing again.  The foam was replaced in 2016, 8 years ago.

The channels should be reversed in software to spread the strain.