On Wed, 22 Oct 2008, Alan BRASLAU wrote:
My question to the mailing list: is this task structured? Is this being managed by anyone?
Unfortunately, not. Taco started working on the documentation and spent more than a month rewriting the font documentation. Most of the old manual is now under svn with a open documentation license, so anyone can contribute. See http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextman/ for details. But, Taco is busy with luatex, and no one else has contributed much (note to self: look at the documentation again). I had decided to work on the wiki, but only thing that I have done so far is reorganize the front page. I have been thinking about working on the installation page, but ... (insert favorite excuse)
Perhaps this was discussed at the User Meeting last August. I would have liked to participate (had I been available)...
It was discussed extensively. From what I understood, the conclusion was that someone from the community needs to take the initiative to *maintain* the manuals. Take the big manual for example. It is fairly complete, but some of the documentation is outdated (e.g., it recommends \setupindenting[big] instead of \setupindenting[big,yes], there are a few more options that have been added to itemize, descriptions, enumerations, etc.). So, in most cases, only minor corrections are needed to bring it up to date. We need someone to go through the manual, point out which parts are not clear and check if all the commands work as presented. And try to correct things if possible, or ask on the mailing list for someone else to correct certain sections. Someone needs to manage the whole process. Hans and Taco do not have the time to maintain the documentation. So far, no one has taken this responsibility. One does not have to be a context expert to do this. Just be able to devote some time to the documentation every other week or so. I feel that one area where context documentation is lacking is that most of the documentation is by Hans. In Latex, there are many introductory documentations by different authors. This is useful, because everyone has a different style of presentation, and different users may find some styles easier to understand than others. Right now, if someone does not like Hans's style of writing, he/she is stuck. We need more people to write about ConTeXt. Aditya