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On 20 Jul 2014, at 22:24, Mojca Miklavec
On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Gerben Wierda wrote:
Sorry, you can’t expect users to be able to do that. Lamport created LaTeX *and* wrote the “LaTeX User’s Guide and Reference manual”.
<teasing> Indeed. Sorry, you can't do that to users. Christian Schenk also created MikTeX (I still have MikTeX files from 23 years ago) *and* is still developing it actively and answering emails from users. </teasing>
The authors mentioned below were all developers too. You need that level of understanding to write a manual.
What kind of developers? Did they contribute to the LaTeX core? (Many ConTeXt users are developers, but it highly depends what you count as a developer.)
Some contributed packages, some other stuff (even printer drivers). They all were deeply involved with the inside of TeX and LaTeX at a level that they would have to understand TeX and LaTeX to the core as they were developers in that environment
Hans & Taco: how much money would need to be raised to produce something of the quality of Kopka & Daly’s “Guide to LaTeX”? or Goossens, Mittelbach & Samarin’s “The LaTeX Companion”?
What do you mean with "of the quality of these books"? Having a similar number of pages written in comparable quality (something like a revised beginner's manual) or so complete in description of the functionality as the mentioned manuals?
I agree these are now outdated in several areas and less useful as they were half a decade ago. But something that is complete enough for a user (not a TeXnician), doesn’t contain too many white spots and certainly does not contain stuff that isn’t true anymore.
My estimate would be that a complete context reference with well-described options and including trivial examples would require cca. 10.000-50.000 pages. Maybe others have different estimates, but now do the math. (Existing manuals like MetaFun or the old cont-en.pdf are roughly 400 pages. But that's nowhere near 10 % of the ConTeXt functionality. One would need to document the whole TeX part, the whole metapost part, the whole lua part, the whole xml, all perl, ruby and lua scripts, write better man pages, probably list the whole Unicode to show the ConTeXt names in one appendix …)
If a tool needs 50.000 pages to document its use, you are in trouble (in more ways than one). I think in reality a set of manuals, with core functionality and all kinds of extras a manual of 500 pages and maybe a reference manual of the same size would be something useful and thus meaningful. Stuff like MetaFun can have its own manual and doesn’t need to be in a core ConTeXt manual. A user manual is enough. You don’t need a developer manual. So, documenting all the development you can do with ConTeXt (programming in lua and whatnot) would for me not be what is needed for a user manual. What a user manual does is what cont-en.pdf does, but then up to date and complete. G