Re: [NTG-context] Best source of ConTeXt documentation?
This is one of the sore points of ConTeXt and of the development effort. People at Pragma are willing to show off but not willing to share code and teach by example... contrary to most opensource projects I have seen. There is another gallery of examples without source for some pdfTeX material at: http://www.tug.org/applications/pdftex/index.html and as you can see there is a large intersection with the some of the familiar developers at Pragma. Maybe it is time for us to start an group to reverse-engineer some of these files and post them into a public archive. Paulo Ney de Souza >From ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl Sun Aug 1 19:55:39 2004 >From: skhilji@tampabay.rr.com >Subject: Re: [NTG-context] Best source of ConTeXt documentation? >To: ntg-context@ntg.nl > >I'd like to see the sources of all the PDF files available at pragma-ade. Its much easier to look at examples and learn from it than to ask for complete documentation. > >Salman > > >_______________________________________________ >ntg-context mailing list >ntg-context@ntg.nl >http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context >
Hello,
This is one of the sore points of ConTeXt and of the development effort. People at Pragma are willing to show off but not willing to share code and teach by example... contrary to most opensource projects I have seen.
Oh come on, this is completely crap. The people at PRAGMA (i.e. Hans) share ConTeXt, wich is the holy grail that PRAGMA is based on (besides the knowledge). It is such a generous gift to the community. Please think about if you write stuff like that. You are right, that not all (only few) manuals are available in .tex format. See pdftex manual and the magazines. Putting source code online needs time, a lot of time. Source code needs to get documented. And I don't know Hans very well, but I'd guess that his day only has 24h. There are already some styles in the ConTeXt wiki. And there are styles that come with the distribution.
Maybe it is time for us to start an group to reverse-engineer some of these files and post them into a public archive.
Why reverse-engineer? Just cook up the style you want. If you have questions doing this, ask on the ConTeXt list. If you are ready, put the style onto the Wiki. The styles at pragma are very good, but definitely not the only way to go. Making a good style is not copy/paste. It is a matter of experience. Experience is something you have to gain yourself. And yes, it is time for us to put examples online. But the ConTeXt community is still rather small. So there won't be many results in a short time. Paulo, You can do the first step. Go to the wiki, edit a page that states your questions regarding style development. Put a table of contents or something similar there, which steps you would like to see, which things you would like to have explained and so on. After that "we" (the more experienced ConTeXt users) can fill in the gaps. And finally we all have a small manual on style design. This is much better than being so aggressive on the unwillingness to share source. Patrick (btw: looking for some beta testers for a new service) -- ConTeXt wiki: http://contextgarden.net texshow-web: http://texshow.contextgarden.net List archive: http://archive.contextgarden.net
Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:
This is one of the sore points of ConTeXt and of the development
i addition to patricks remarks: - it would take a lot of effort to keep such a source code repository up to date and in sync (else too many questions) with the pdf repositoty - we only publish documented sources - i want to stimulate users to writ etheir own styles not to mimick existing ones (i.e. avoid the 'all tex files look the same' problem) - also: most examples in manuals are typeset using \startbuffer ... \stopbuffer \typebuffer \getbuffer so ... there are no hidden tricks (unless it would bother/confuse users); and .. things like cover designs i wanna keep for myself if only to avoid cutting and pasting in due time, probably more sources will go on line, but only when i have a system/method of keeping things in sync; i don't like the idea to go on-line for each change that i want to make (we only have dsl for half a year, before that i had to do all on 64 lines which is no fun) Hans
participants (3)
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Hans Hagen -
Patrick Gundlach -
Paulo Ney de Souza