[ptx] Hugin vs. PTGui - some observations

[JD Smith]

On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 13:36 +0200, Thomas Steiner wrote:
> Mike,
> 
> > what is out-of-date in our very detailed Hugin tutorial (german only)
> 
> I know the tutorial and it's very nice. But still I think that it
> makes sense to have one official documentation of all functions and
> possibilities. And you need an internetconnection to look up something
> in your tutorial, for beginners it would be easier to press "F1" and
> get some help immediately.

I agree.  Writing a manual also has the interesting effect of exposing
the troublesome interface issues.  If it's not easy to explain in a
paragraph or two, it probably could use some work.  Once you have a
manual nicely formatted in CVS, keeping it up to date is not hard. I've
used TeXinfo in the past and been happy with it; you can target HTML
and PDF from one source, you get an Index and TOC "for free", and it
uses simple formatting which is easy to keep up to date.  I'd be
willing to pitch in a bit of help with a manual, if others are
interested in contributing.  In the end, we'd need Pablo to go over the
tricky bits and provide the wisdom only carnal knowledge of the code
can provide.  

A rough outline would be:

1. Introduction: background on PanoTools, other tools, etc.  Don't need
to go through everything, just the important stuff.  Link to the wiki
where relevant.

2. Quick Start Guide: Distribute an example single row panorama set at
low-resolution, and walk the user through creating her first cylindrical
pano, after selecting control points, etc.

3. Building Panoramas: More detailed description of the process,
including:

     I. Control Points: manual, "semi-automatic" fine-tuned, horizontal
        & vertical manual CPs, automatic with autopano*, trimming out
        bad CPs using the CP list, verification.
    II. Optimization: which parameters to optimize when.
   III. Preview: How to use the preview effectively.
    IV. Blending: Enblend, PTStitcher blender, etc.  Links to other
        docs.
     V. Output: target size, projection to use, etc.

4. Calibrating Your Equipment: Lens calibrations, for field of view,
geometric distortions (a/b/c), offsets (d/e), vignetting, and chromatic
aberration.  Use lens databases, and storing your own lens parameter set
for later re-use.  

5. Publishing Panoramas: A brief link to available resources on making
Cubic VR's, viewer tools, and other web-based things.

6. Acknowledgements: Who did what and when.


A last issue is whether wxWidgets has it's own preferred help format.

JD