OpenScad Help Centre

[old man emu]

I think that we should stop for a moment and review what we have done so far, and to consider if we should establish an agreed plan of attack.

It is becoming clear that there are two groups contributing to this thread, and the groups can be identified by their familiarity with programming and software development in general. I place myself in the group that has very little experience. The other group contains people like Roxy, dacb, Printbus, Fri and the others who we see posting in the Marlin update thread. These people are obviously experienced programmers.

I see my group as being like the typist in the word processing pool. We don't need to know the source code for Word, but would really like to be able to use as many of its features as possible. The other group is the developers back at Microsoft who are working to debug the current version of Word, and at the same time working on its updates.

When I started this thread, I was sort of looking for the assembly of a document "OpenScad for Klutzes". I was, and am, prepared to pose the seemingly dumb questions, but in order to finish up with a useful document, I suggest that we need to go right back to Square One.

I thought I had gone there when I started to ask about syntax, but replies to those questions have made me realize that syntax is at least Square Three. Having thought about it, I am now thinking that Square One is "The OpenScad alphabet". We have jumped too far ahead with what we are looking at at the moment. For me, it is like asking a First Grader to read War and Peace in the original Cyrillic script.

I did some searching for 'symbols in programming' and found that, as well as the usual +, -, * /, sin, cos and tan, other symbols like braces, brackets, =, <,> and so on are just as important in getting a bit of code to work. Explanations of the use of symbols are not found in in the OpenScad documentation. I put that failure down to the documentation having been written by people who know their " programming alphabet" and forget that many users of the program they are developing can see the Cat on the Mat, but cannot express what they see in good code. The documentation is very heavily infested with programmers jargon, and even with mathematical knowledge that is beyond the ken of us Klutzes.

I appreciate the input that the programmers amongst you have had to this thread, but I would ask you to dumb down your inputs until we simpleton users have caught on.

Old Man Emu