On Monday 08 March 2010 13:31:28 Hans Hagen wrote:
As I was on the Dante 2010 meeting and as I could not access my mail last week, today I ran into the long thread about documentation. I will not reply to each mail but stick to this summary. Now, I understand that there is a lack of documentation but before one complains too loud about it, consider the following:
I was out of town for the last two weeks. I too saw this thread but did not have the time to read it all. I agree that the ConTeXt reference manual needs to be updated and completed, in particular concerning mkIV. Nevertheless, I have been able to get quite far using the (old) mkII manual and find it to be pretty good, even if not perfect. For this reason, I had contacted Hans and Taco to gain access to the source but have to date made only a few, minor corrections. This is a project that I try to work on in my "spare time". As none of us have much time to spare from our other responsibilities, documentation always proceeds too slowly. (Indeed, while traveling the last two weeks, I had hoped to have some time available to work more on this. However, I did not do anything!) Part of the problem with writing documentation is being expert enough to know all of the in's and out's of ConTeXt. Nevertheless, I believe that improvements can be done. Also, taking such initiative will motivate the real experts to eventually complete the holes (or give hints on what further to include). Alan P.S. Concerning LaTeX, whereas the User's Guide and Reference Manual (what we locally call "the lion") and the Companion (1st edition, what we call "the dog") are excellent starting points. I find that the second edition to be confusing and so hardly ever refer to it. The documentation of the diverse packages is of diverse quality.