Xan wrote:
Wei-Wei Guo wrote:
Hi everyone,
After fighting with ConTeXt one month, I find it's too difficult. I have two years experience of LaTeX. I never thought ConTeXt could be so difficult. Using ConTeXt is like climbing a steep mountain, every step need extensive searching, reading, and asking.
Sorry for the useless complain. I'm stuck by so many problems. I might be lack of the basic knowledge of ConTeXt. Could someone tell me where I can find manuals or papers that describe the logic of ConTeXt design and basics of ConTeXt programming.
Thanks in advance.
Best wishes, Wei-Wei Yes, there is a hole in that way. I'm agree too. Many have voiced the same complaint. I understand that Hans and every one are occupied with building MKIV (aka LuaTeX), and that documentation is not their highest priority. There's the wiki, the wonderfully active mailing list, and what used to be decent docs from 2001/2002 timeframe. But yes, it's a steep hill to climb, made worth it only by the relative awesomeness of ConTeXt. If there is an existing strategy for creating documentation, I'd love to hear it. My feeling is it's it's time to pay someone to write some good docs. Someone who's not on the development team, who has experience writing technical documentation, and who can shepard list members into crowd sourcing some real documentation. The problem is who. Who has this high technical knowledge and he/she is not developer?. People I know that have this high tech knowledge of ConTeXt is developer. MKIV is stabilizing into usefulness, and now is a good time to start. I suspect list members would donate to such a project, plus we could get some grant money (if that's not all dried up due to the global economy), and maybe some contribution from Pragma itself, and other orgs that depend on ConTeXt. A patchwork quilt of financing, and a project coordinator/writer who sees their work as a labor of love, and a side job, could make this happen. Even if we could only afford 10 hours of work a week, that could get a lot done. In terms of process, I think someone to comb the list archives for common problems and solutions, and wikify them would get the most bang for the buck initially. These wiki entries could later be ConTeXtified into printed (and screen) docs, like Hans' awesome old manuals. Good idea. Just a suggestion. If someone starts new documentation, it should be free. Now the "only" documentation for users is "ConTeXt manual", "Context, an excursion" (and some PracTeX journal and MAPS journal
En/na Corin Royal Drummond ha escrit: articles). These documents are copyrated by Pragma. And for the other hand the license of documentation of ConTeXt is Creative Commons Atribution Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.
I think it's better if the new documentation were free: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 or GNU Free Documentation License. It could estimulate more users than now. It's my opinion.
You missed the reference manual rewrite effort (which is now in remission mostly because of an extremely depressing lack of user feedback). http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page#Documentation That is GNU FDL.
Really how many people are using ConTeXt and how many developers are here? For example, how many people are subscribing in this list: it could tells us what's the number of users.
About 500, IIRC. Taco