WebGPU Fundamentals

This is a series of lessons or tutorials about webgpu.

This is work in progress. Feel free to contribute, especially localizations

Contributing

Of course bug fixes are always welcome.

If you'd like to write a new article please try to always take one step at a time. Don't do 2 or more things in a single step. Explain any new math in the simplest terms possible. Ideally with diagrams where possible. Also it's probably best to ask to make sure someone else isn't already working on a similar article.

Translating

Each translation goes in a folder under webgpu/lessons/<country-code>.

Required files are

langinfo.hanson
index.md
toc.html

langinfo.hanson

Defines various language specific options. Hanson is a JSON like format but allows comments.

Current fields are

{
  // The language (will show up in the language selection menu)
  language: 'English',

  // Phrase that appears under examples
  defaultExampleCaption: "click here to open in a separate window",

  // Title that appears on each page
  title: 'WebGPU Fundamentals',

  // Basic description that appears on each page
  description: 'Learn WebGPU',

  // Link to the language root.
  link: 'http://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/ja',  // replace `ja` with country code

  // html that appears after the article and before the comments
  commentSectionHeader: '<div>Questions? <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/webgpu">Ask on stackoverflow</a>.</div>\n        <div>Issue/Bug? <a href="http://github.com/webgpu/webgpufundamentals/issues">Create an issue on github</a>.</div>',

  // markdown that appears for untranslated articles
  missing: "Sorry this article has not been translated yet. [Translations Welcome](https://github.com/webgpu/webgpufundamentals)! 😄\n\n[Here's the original English article for now]({{{origLink}}}).",

  // the phrase "Table of Contents"
  toc: "Table of Contents",

  // translation of categories
  categoryMapping: {
    'basics': 'Basics',
    'solutions:' 'Solutions',
    'webvr': 'WebVR',
    'optimization': 'Optimization',
    'tips': 'Tips',
    'fundamentals': 'Fundamentals',
    'reference': 'Reference',
  },

}

index.md

This is the template for the main page for each language

toc.html

This is template for the table of contents for the language. It is included on both the index and on each article. The only parts not auto-generated are the ending links which you can translate if you want to. The build system will create a placeholder for every English article for which there is no corresponding article in that language. It will be filled with the missing message from above.

lang.css

This is included if and only if it exists. I'd strongly prefer not to have to use it. In particular I don't want people to get into arguments about fonts but basically it's a way to choose the fonts per language. You should only set the variables that are absolutely needed. Example

/* lessons/ko/lang.css */

/* Only comment in overrides as absolutely necessary! */
:root {
  --article-font-family: "best font for korean article text";
  --headline-font-family: "best font for korean headlines";
  /* a block of code */
  /* --code-block-font-family: "Lucida Console", Monaco, monospace; */
  /* a word in a sentence */
  /* --code-font-family: monospace; */
}

Notice 2 settings are not changed. It seems unlikely to me that code would need a different font per language.

PS: While we're here, I love code fonts with ligatures but they seem like a bad idea for a tutorial site because the ligatures hide the actual characters needed so please don't ask for or use a ligature code font here.

Translation notes

The build process will make a placeholder html file for each article has an english .md file in webgpu/lessons but no corresponding .md file for the language. This is to make it easy to include links in one article that links to another article but that other article has not yet been translated. This way you don't have to go back and fix already translated articles. Just translate one article at a time and leave the links as is. They'll link to placeholders until someone translates the missing articles.

Articles have front matter at the top

Title: Localized Title of article
Description: Localized description of article (used in RSS and social media tags)
TOC: Localized text for Table of Contents

DO NOT CHANGE LINKS : For example a link to a local resources might look like

[text](link)

or

<img src="somelink">

While you can add query parameters (see below) do not add "../" to try to make the link relative to the .md file. Links should stay as though the article exists at the same location as the original English.

To build

The site is built into the out folder

Steps

git clone https://github.com/webgpu/webgpufundamentals.git
npm ci
npm run build
npm start

now open your browser to http://localhost:8080

Continuous build

You can run npm run watch to get continuous building. Only the article .md files and files that are normally copied are supported. The table of contents, templates, and index pages are not watched.

Development

If you are working on updating dependencies with npm link you can use npm run build-ci and/or npm run watch-no-check to skip the dependency check.

Building the WGSL Function Reference

The WGSL function reference is currently auto-generated for English by hackily scanning the spec HTML. Hackily means it's likely to break but it mostly works or at least seem to provide something kind of useful, for now.

To scan the latest spec again use npm run generate-wgsl-function-reference then check that it worked (build and look at the page). Of particular note, check that angle brackets like vec4<f32> exist where where they should and also check that <pre> sections like in textureGather are correctly formatted.

For other languages you'll likely need to copy the English file and translate.