LÖVE

Could someone give me a quick tutorial on using world vs local coordinates?

Never done it before so just curious about where to even start. Once I can get going I can play with it and figure it out.

If I have a world that is set to X=2000, Y=2000. How does local coordinates relate to that?

If I set a body to 300,200 on the screen, is that world coordinates? Or local coordinates and then how do I relate that to world coordinates? It seems that a 3rd element needs to be there somewhere in what piece of the world is currently on screen, ie, a camera. Am I completely off base?

I haven't used the physics library a lot, however I do now that in your example those are WORLD coordinates.
I always thought local coordinates are those in the objects itself, so the shape relative to the body.

So maybe I'm confusing local coordinates with screen coordinates which would make absolute sense. If that is the case, how do I translate world coordinates to screen coordinates?

Well.. world coordinates - where the "viewport" begins.
If you have your 2000x2000 world and the screen is 800x600, you have to display only a certain part (or scale down), so if the topleft corner starts at coordinate (300, 450) you will get worldx - 300, worldy - 450.
Some pseudo-code: (xoffset and yoffset are the point in the world where the topleft corner of the screen is, and a is the object) I hope you understand this, if you don't... I'll need to start learning to interact with people instead of computers