On Sun, 2011-08-14 at 16:39 -0600, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:
Wow, that would be great if we got tens of millions of users to buy the Book :D :D :D
;)
Well, most people using Linux have some technical facility, so they can configure their own editors.
I don't know about that. That might have been the case in the early part of the previous decade, but not so any more. Ubuntu changed all that, with a large portion of its demographic being "regular users". Most of them are not programmers.
That is actually one option I'm considering. In any case.
e.g. an appendix for gedit, one for Npp, one for Scite, Gleany, whatever.
I did look at gedit, but for the current vision I have for introducing ConTeXt to non-technical folks it does not work.
How so? I use it regularly for ConTeXt code. You just have to use the LaTeX syntax highlighting, but writing a ConTeXt one should be straightforward to someone familiar with ConTeXt. The LaTex syntax highlighting that comes with gedit could be used as a fast starter.
Actually, I spent months checking for a better candidate than Npp, experimenting with just about everything I could get my hands on. On balance Npp got the best score on all the benchmarks I set. That's not to say I wouldn't prefer something better, but that decision is done, only to be revisited if something really AMAZING happens in the next few months.
I'm not disagreeing with you that Npp might be great for beginnings, I'm just saying that many beginners can't use it because it isn't available for their operating system.
WinEdt would really have been be my ideal choice -- but the lack of unicode, bidi is just a non-starter. TeXWorks has a long way to go, and although I'm a fan of Qt its open-type implementation is buggy; so some Arabic-monospaced fonts don't show up correctly.
It's actually an even worse choice than Npp in the sense that, not only is it available only for Windows, it's non-free.
Syntax highlighting is only a small part of what we're doing with Npp. Otherwise, just the user-defined dialog of Npp would be sufficient. Click-and-tag, tooltips ... these make for real user-friendliness.
True enough. I agree that a GUI would be really great.
Thanks for the criticism and
Best wishes Idris
Take care and good luck with the book! I'll probably get a copy myself. -- Kip Warner -- Software Engineer OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred http://www.thevertigo.com