Thank you Sir Coleman. I’m a Context beginner and I’d love a good book introducing me to Context. I’ve wasted many hours trying to figure out how to do things that turned out to be simple. The answer is often/sometimes buried in the documentation, and what would really help me is a book that is more of an index to the existing documentation that is not out of date, with perhaps some simple examples. One case that comes to mind is to pass a couple of numbers to Lua, have it do a calculation and use the result in Context. Regards, Peter

On 14/02/2024, at 9:03 AM, Sir Coleman via ntg-context wrote:

Acknowledged.

However, this does reinforce my point, that the documentation needs to be updated. The examples on the wiki still use \getcounter, and naturally they all fail to compile. Hence, my ambition to create a book to serve as the documentation, which I find is a better medium for communication rather than wikis.

Now, as to my question, to understand the low level TeX programming language, will the manuals "Low Level TeX" be enough?

Thanks. ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

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Please write one. More documentation is needed. On Wed, Feb 14, 2024 at 3:55 AM Sir Coleman via ntg-context < ntg-context@ntg.nl> wrote:

I'm glad to know there's a demand for this book.

Hopefully soon I'll upload a draft of it to GitLab, so if there's anything that you learned that you would like to contribute to this book, you would be able to do so. I personally would be very happy if someone would give me examples of things a user would like to do, because my own use cases can only go that far.

I'll make sure to make finding information in this book as direct as possible. If you find that some information in this book isn't clear or easy to learn from (or locate in the first place), then I'll expect a complaint about it.

I'll post here a link to the GitLab repository when part of the book has been written and ready for feedback. Should take some time, but not too long.

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maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman3/lists/ntg-context.ntg.nl webpage : https://www.pragma-ade.nl / https://context.aanhet.net (mirror) archive : https://github.com/contextgarden/context wiki : https://wiki.contextgarden.net

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-- Respect, Shiv Shankar Dayal

First of all, I'm grateful for your offer, and hope that you find it valuable indeed. However, I must say that this isn't what I had in mind. I wanted to create more of a reference, a complete reference, and one that's of course not meant to be read from cover to cover. What you're suggesting sounds more like a tutorial to me. Don't get me wrong: we need both a reference and a tutorial. If necessary, I'll create a quick tutorial that demonstrates how to quickly use ConTeXt, and gives hints on where to look further in my book, or whatever else you and others see needs to be written. This is a bit interesting, though. Should I start with a tutorial, or the reference? I personally lean more towards the reference, but of course if the community thinks that the tutorial first would be more valuable, then that'll get the higher priority. What I had in mind was a single reference that taught you all you needed to become as experienced with ConTeXt as Hans Hagen et al, and all the information you'll need to essentially be able to achieve whatever you want. I found (and hope the ConTeXt developers take no offense) that the documentation for how to become an advanced user was nonexistent, and for some specific cases more scattered around. Thus, the book was born. In other words, it's a book that teaches you how to become an advanced ConTeXt user, certainly far beyond "A not so short introduction to ConTeXt". Would the ConTeXt community more prefer such a book, or a more quick introductory book for ConTeXt? Because I don't think these two would serve well as one, but rather the former backing up the latter, i.e., two different books. Thanks.

Hi, This small example from BachoTeX 2023 could perhaps be useful for someone: https://github.com/mpsmath/stepbystep /Mikael On Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 8:31 AM Jan Ulrich Hasecke via ntg-context wrote:

Hi,

Am 14.02.24 um 19:45 schrieb Sir Coleman via ntg-context:

I wanted to create more of a reference, a complete reference, and one that's of course not meant to be read from cover to cover.

I think that setup-en.pdf is a good starting point for a complete reference as it contains the commands and their options. With added explanations and examples it would be a great reference to beginners.

juh

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On Thu, 15 Feb 2024, Mikael Sundqvist wrote:

Hi,

This small example from BachoTeX 2023 could perhaps be useful for someone: https://github.com/mpsmath/stepbystep

For tutorials, I had played around with using a git repo as a tutorial: https://github.com/adityam/context-slides-example/commits The following page is generated automatically from the git commit log: https://adityam.github.io/context-blog/post/presentation-40-commits-redux/ Aditya

On 2/15/2024 8:25 PM, Tommaso Gordini wrote:

Thanks everyone for the suggestions on the manuals. I knew the resource reported by Alain and, of course, that of Joaquín, whose translation into Italian I have completed, but not yet refined.

However, I didn't know the file reported by Mikael, which I found to be an excellent tutorial to get started with.

The documentation on ConTeXt is copious, and we know it: just look at the manuals on Contextgarden. But it is decidedly fragmented, and this disorientates the user.

I believe, therefore, that what the community misses is a tutorial/reference manual/complete guide that comes /directly/ from the ConTeXt team (Hans, Wolfgang, etc). And, above all, that it is up to date: on Contextgarden many ‘valid’ manuals date back to many years ago, and the obsolescence of the software guides could make people say something like «well, stuff from years ago, I don't trust it».

A manual in a single file that has, in short, the seal of officiality: the various resources in circulation are just as many excellent efforts by individuals, who however have put their own approach to ConTeXt into their work. Perhaps there is a more correct approach than others, more essential, which is worth knowing.

I am speaking to you as a LaTeX user, and therefore I may have written a lot of nonsense in my message. I conclude by saying that, in the end, the ConTeXt team may not be interested in all this, and therefore our discussions are pure academic. :) As with latex it's not dev who have to write documentation, manuals, books ... so any addition is okay. There are only 24 hours in my day (maybe a few more in wolfgangs),

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