If you think about it you can see where YT is coming from. Imagine if a malicious translator decided to invent phrases the author never said. The author, translators and captioners should have formed an authoring group. Technical people are sometimes too trusting outside of their field. Remember that kid who messed up the entire Scottish wikipedia.
Both, definitely.
I probably would never have started KiCad if the only entry point was a very good, detailed 500 page documentation.
The videos make a lot of things much easier, at least for beginners.
If you want to solve a specific problem, a written documentation is necessary sooner or later. And a good forum :-):
We know it from school and study: explanations on the blackboard and textbooks.
Tutorial does not necessarily mean “detailed 500 page documentation”.
A “quick start” guide may contain text, images and video (where it proves to be helpful).
I think that we are more focused on the media rather than the content here… If we look into the content, documentation can be roughly divided in 4 parts: Tutorials, how-tos, references and explanations
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On YT there’s a lot of tutorials because it’s good to see how people actually use the software. With it you can see what people do after selecting an option, how they use a tool and perceive the little details that often can be forgotten to mention in a written text.
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On Kicad website we have really good reference docs. It’s comprehensive, searchable and cover basically everything you need to fine tuning the software to your preferences/workflow
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Explanations are deep-dive technical documents, and I’ll skip it because I think it’s outside the scope of this conversation.
And finally, the how-tos are the small pieces of documentation telling people “How do I do X?” and I think it’s the more lacking content we have for Kicad.
How-tos action-focused instead of expertise-focused. It doesn’t care if I am a pro or a total beginner, it just show the steps needed to accomplish X. “How to configura Kicad for a boardshop”, “hot-to to apply hierarchy to an existing project”, “how to customize a custom library component” are topics that are small in content, easy do digest, work in most medias and are somewhat easy to search for.
A nice example I found is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMQgIM53zQM
It is structured this way:
- Talk about the feature
- Explain how to do it (You can actually stop the video after this)
- Show the final result
- Explain how to do it on more complex situations
- Sugest a plugin to automation
And of course, it can be done on any media! Maybe we can create a page on Kicad docs to list those resources?
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