Dnia Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 04:37:23PM +0200, Taco Hoekwater napisał(a):
Hi,
Aditya Mahajan wrote:
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.
Aditya's reply sums it up pretty well. I just want to add a quick note.
After at least half a dozen reiterations of this discussion (and it is indeed always exactly the same discussion), I have now reached the point where I no longer feel the slightest need to take any action any more. From where I stand, it seems that the unhappy people just want to complain about, but are not willing to help improve the existing documentation, and that the happy people just want to post pointers but fail to see a real need to improve anything.
I'm (relatively) new here (I've been subscribed to the list for a few years, but only recently started to use ConTeXt more seriously), but I'd like to take the risk and add my point of view. I miss a good documentation *a lot*. OTOH, if I were to choose among the uber-community and uber-manual, I'd prefer the first one (maybe that's why people prefer the status quo;)). I would love to help improve the existing docs, though. Having uber-manuals *and* uber-community would smash this poor LaTeX-thing out of the market;P. The question is: what do I do? I post something to the wiki from time to time, but I don't want to engage myself too much - I'm currently involved in at least one *big* project (which is, btw, connected with writing some LaTeX document classes); together with my work (doing and teaching mathematics) this takes *a lot* of time... What's more, I can't really help writing manuals for something I don't completely understand...
I myself would be much more willing to spend time on (managing|writing) the manual if there were any people showing an active interest in it.
Assume that I finally learn how to use that SVN thing and that I try (in some indefinite time, though) post my remarks on the existing docs, my examples of files so that they could be either introduced into the manuals or deemed non-ConTeXt-esque enough;) or my suggestions of rewriting something: would this help? And a general remark: of course, my point is not to wipe out LaTeX. It has its place. But popularizing ConTeXt would be great (and I'm doing it all the time among my friends!). And good manuals are a *must* then... Obviously, writing a good manual takes really much time (and from some point of view is harder than actually writing code, I guess - it's very similar in maths, when it's way easier to jot down some notes for yourself than to prepare some proof for actual publication...) As I said before (in another post), it's completely obvious for me that neither Hans nor you, Taco, have time for writing a good documentation...
Best wishes, Taco
Best, -- Marcin Borkowski (http://mbork.pl) <><