On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Andrea Valle wrote:
By reading the source :) Joking of course ... but not entirely.
Yes, that's an important point. Many times the options I'm searching for are not documented: so, or I'm able to find an example in wiki/mailing list or probably it would be easy to take a look to the sources, I guess. I know it's far from being polite, but really I'd like to have a "How-to-find-your-way-thru-the-source Tutorial for total newbie".
The first thing that you need to know is the file where a particular command is defined. You can search the source tree on contextgarden; or grep the files in your computer. After a while you will remember which file defines a particular command.
On my mac, they are hidden: so, first step, change your visualization preferences thru a googled script form Terminal.
Sorry, I have no idea of how things work on a Mac, but it seems strange to hide the entire tex tree.
Second, the (in)famous tex tree structure is far from being clear for me.
Almost all of ConTeXt files are in $TEXMF/tex/context/base (fonts, are of course a different issue)
Third, and most important, how to extract infos from sources?
This is the easiest. Most of ConTeXt commands are written in a consistent manner. Hans uses verbose variable names, which makes it easy to "read" the code. Also in most cases the source files have lot of comments. Aditya