"...the book about Hasselt". That actually made me laugh out loud. What a loser I am. Ok, goodnight now. :) On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 2:10 AM, Michael Saunders wrote:

...

You mean like the beginner's manual

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/ms-cb-en.pdf

and the user manual

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/cont-eni.pdf

...

...

amongst 46 others by Pragma

No, not like those. I mean like a real manual. I read the book about Hasselt---a few examples without explanations. I've looked at most of the fifty or so documents over which this virtual manual is supposed to be spread. They are about as informative. Most of these documents seem to be 5--12 years old. The wiki is even more patchy. The idea that a computer manual is something that exists implicitly in the discussions of a mailing list is a new idea to me.

You can't be serious about "mk.pdf" being a manual. Even it admits, "This document is not so much a users manual as a history of the development." Little after that point is intelligible.

Compared with the clear, abundant documentation of the LaTeX world, Context seems like a secret that a small club is trying to keep. It's not even clear from the manuals that development is ongoing, much less that there is some advantage in using it.

So, will there ever be a manual to MK IV? In how many years?

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

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net

___________________________________________________________________________________

Am 05.03.10 03:10, schrieb Michael Saunders:

I've looked at most of the fifty or so documents over which this virtual manual is supposed to be spread. They are about as informative. Most of these documents seem to be 5--12 years old.

*The LaTeX manual* is 16 years old. http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/LaTeX-A-Document-Preparation... \bye Wolfgang

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 03:10, Michael Saunders wrote:

You can't be serious about "mk.pdf" being a manual.  Even it admits, "This document is not so much a users manual as a history of the development."  Little after that point is intelligible.

Yes, I agree with you on this point !

On Thu, 4 Mar 2010 20:10:43 -0600 Michael Saunders scribit:

...

You mean like the beginner's manual

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/ms-cb-en.pdf

and the user manual

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/cont-eni.pdf

...

...

amongst 46 others by Pragma

No, not like those. I mean like a real manual. I read the book about Hasselt---a few examples without explanations. I've looked at most of the fifty or so documents over which this virtual manual is supposed to be spread. They are about as informative. Most of these documents seem to be 5--12 years old. The wiki is even more patchy. The idea that a computer manual is something that exists implicitly in the discussions of a mailing list is a new idea to me.

You can't be serious about "mk.pdf" being a manual. Even it admits, "This document is not so much a users manual as a history of the development." Little after that point is intelligible.

Compared with the clear, abundant documentation of the LaTeX world, ...

LoL I have a good meter of books about Latex. But Latex is 'congenitally' unable to do what I want to obtain. Within 6 months, with the Seroul book & the Context Manual & the help of this list, I made more and better than in 10 years of Latex. With Latex you must accept to do what Latex wants to be done. With Context (and even with the older Tex), you are free (not free in an denglish sense ('gratuit', 'kostenfrei'), but 'libre' or 'frei').

Context seems like a secret that a small club is trying to keep. It's not even clear from the manuals that development is ongoing, much less that there is some advantage in using it.

So, will there ever be a manual to MK IV? In how many years?

I think that the usersd need that the '[...,...,...]' should be replaced or referenced by lists of parameters and we need a wiki-glossary of the params. So we need a wiki to which users can access. I tried to access t the contextgarden, but my access was forbidden. So it is true that Context is much more better than the way its access is managed. -- René Bastian www.pythoneon.org www.musiques-rb.org http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/

Dnia Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 08:10:43PM -0600, Michael Saunders napisał(a):

...

You mean like the beginner's manual

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/ms-cb-en.pdf

and the user manual

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/cont-eni.pdf

...

...

amongst 46 others by Pragma

No, not like those. I mean like a real manual. I read the book about Hasselt---a few examples without explanations. I've looked at most of the fifty or so documents over which this virtual manual is supposed to be spread. They are about as informative. Most of these documents seem to be 5--12 years old. The wiki is even more patchy. The idea that a computer manual is something that exists implicitly in the discussions of a mailing list is a new idea to me.

You can't be serious about "mk.pdf" being a manual. Even it admits, "This document is not so much a users manual as a history of the development." Little after that point is intelligible.

Compared with the clear, abundant documentation of the LaTeX world, Context seems like a secret that a small club is trying to keep. It's not even clear from the manuals that development is ongoing, much less that there is some advantage in using it.

So, will there ever be a manual to MK IV? In how many years?

Hi, this is a strong (but fair, I believe) criticism. I guess that we all know that the main problem with ConTeXt is documentation; my feelings are similar, and although I started using ConTeXt using the "user manual" and asking on the list - and that helped a lot - having a good user manual would be great. I have to disagree, though, with the "clear, abundant documentation of the LaTeX world". This is far from true: the docs for LaTeX are spread over numerous package documentations, not-so-well written books and terribly written beginners' books (the LaTeX book on wikibooks is awful, for example). So the situation is pretty much similar to ConTeXt. The difference is that the LaTeX core is rather primitive (compared to ConTeXt), and even a bad manual can do - and the mainstream packages are usually well documented. In case of ConTeXt, most functionality one needs is in the core, which is documented as badly as LaTeX's. Regards -- Marcin Borkowski (http://mbork.pl) This program is written in Perl. While stronger people find reading Perl code character-building, it should not be shown to people in their formative years. The author will not accept any responsibility for any moral grief caused. (The McKornik Jr. Public License)