Pd Documentation chapter 1: introduction

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This is the HTML documentation for the Pd computer program. Pd is free and can be downloaded from the internet; go to http://msp.ucsd.edu/software.html to get it.

1.1. guide to the documentation

Pd's documentation lives in the "doc" folder of the distribution and consists of:

This HTML manual has six sections:

  1. this overview
  2. a theory of operations, explaining how Pd works
  3. instructions on installing Pd and getting it to run
  4. externals
  5. release notes and known bugs
  6. installing from source

For a list of all the objects you can use menu Help/List of objects. To get help on any Pd object you can right click on it; or you can browse the help patches by choosing menu Help/Browser and looking in "Pure Data/5.reference".

The "example" patches are also available from Pd's browser. Some additional patches in "7.stuff" might also be helpful.

To get started writing your own C extensions, refer to chapter 4 of this manual.

1.2. other resources

There is a very extensive Pd community web site, pure-data.info, which aims to be the central resource for Pd, from documentation and downloads; to forums, member pages, and a patch exchange. You can check puredata.info/docs/BooksAboutPd/.

More documentation (warning: very outdated specially on "how to install Pd") is available on the Pd FLOSS site: en.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/_full/ (English) and fr.flossmanuals.net/PureData/ (French).

Most of the interesting news related to Pd shows up on the Pd mailing list, maintained by IOhannes zmölnig. To subscribe or browse the archives visit: https://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list. This is the best source of recent information regarding installation problems and bugs. It is perfectly reasonable to post "beginner" questions on this list; alternatively you can contact msp@ucsd.edu for help.

Many extensions to Pd are announced on the mailing list. In particular, for people interested in graphics, there is a 3D graphics rendering package, named GEM, based on OpenGL, written by Mark Danks, adapted to Linux by Guenter Geiger, and now maintained by IOhannes zmölnig. You can get it from: http://gem.iem.at/, via "Find externals" or package manager of your Linux distribution.



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