On Jul 29, 2008, at 2:44 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
Hi Gerben,
On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Gerben Wierda wrote:
This should be based on (imo) merging the content of the excursion and the manual.
Here (and sometime earlier in the thread) you have suggested that you find the scattered documentation of ConTeXt confusing and would like to see an exhaustive manual. I agree with that in principle, but still believe that excursion and the manual should be separate. The manual can be a superset of excursion, but there needs to be "beginner's manual".
If there is a exhaustive manual, it will be *huge*. An exhaustive manual on math will be of the size of a book; so would an exhaustive manual on metapost/mp-lib (think of an updated metafun manual). I can also imagine an exhaustive manual for fonts to be big (how do we handle fonts for lua/xetex/pdftex; how do we handle fonts for different scripts, etc.); and fairly large manuals for floats (three four mechanism for tables, about 20 ways to move around floats, etc.), critical editions (I don't know the status of the proposed module), bib module (the user manual for biblatex, which is similar in spirit to bib module, is huge), etc.
So, if we want exhaustive documentation and a beginner's manual, I see that we only have the option of expanding on the excursion to have an upto date beginner's manual, expanding on the manual to have an upto date (but not exhaustive) user manual, and have a series of specialized exhaustive manuals. But that will still mean that the documentation is scattered.
The way I see it, we can update the documentation, but not really solve the problem of scattered documentation :-(
Before things balloon to a size it is not feasible anymore, I would suggest keeping manual&reference apart from introductory documents like excursion or 'beginners manual'. And I would be very happy if there was only one decent manual&reference maintained by a group of people, complete and up to date. thers could maintain a beginner's manual on the basis of that, but add the maintenance of a second beginner's manual and suddenly one needs to maintain two things. This cannot completely be avoided (as also in the manual the same thing will be in many places as technique 1 is part of the example for technique 2, etc.). At first, I would suggest that the documentation project would consider itself with one thing: a 'user & reference manual' for ConTeXt. If that succeeds and people have energy left they can do a simplified beginner's manual. Note: personally, I think a beginner's manual could be part of the big manual. Say, an 'excursion' chapter or a 'beginner's section' at the start of each chapter.. G