On 20 Jul 2014, at 22:24, Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Gerben Wierda wrote: >> >> Sorry, you can’t expect users to be able to do that. Lamport >> created LaTeX *and* wrote the “LaTeX User’s Guide and Reference manual”. > > <teasing> > Indeed. Sorry, you can't do that to users. Christian Schenk also > created MikTeX (I still have MikTeX files from 23 years ago) *and* is > still developing it actively and answering emails from users. > </teasing> > >> The authors mentioned below were all developers too. You need that level of >> understanding to write a manual. > > What kind of developers? Did they contribute to the LaTeX core? (Many > ConTeXt users are developers, but it highly depends what you count as > a developer.) Some contributed packages, some other stuff (even printer drivers). They all were deeply involved with the inside of TeX and LaTeX at a level that they would have to understand TeX and LaTeX to the core as they were developers in that environment >> Hans & Taco: how much money would need to be raised to produce something of >> the quality of Kopka & Daly’s “Guide to LaTeX”? or Goossens, Mittelbach & >> Samarin’s “The LaTeX Companion”? > > What do you mean with "of the quality of these books"? Having a > similar number of pages written in comparable quality (something like > a revised beginner's manual) or so complete in description of the > functionality as the mentioned manuals? I agree these are now outdated in several areas and less useful as they were half a decade ago. But something that is complete enough for a user (not a TeXnician), doesn’t contain too many white spots and certainly does not contain stuff that isn’t true anymore. > My estimate would be that a complete context reference with > well-described options and including trivial examples would require > cca. 10.000-50.000 pages. Maybe others have different estimates, but > now do the math. (Existing manuals like MetaFun or the old cont-en.pdf > are roughly 400 pages. But that's nowhere near 10 % of the ConTeXt > functionality. One would need to document the whole TeX part, the > whole metapost part, the whole lua part, the whole xml, all perl, ruby > and lua scripts, write better man pages, probably list the whole > Unicode to show the ConTeXt names in one appendix …) If a tool needs 50.000 pages to document its use, you are in trouble (in more ways than one). I think in reality a set of manuals, with core functionality and all kinds of extras a manual of 500 pages and maybe a reference manual of the same size would be something useful and thus meaningful. Stuff like MetaFun can have its own manual and doesn’t need to be in a core ConTeXt manual. A user manual is enough. You don’t need a developer manual. So, documenting all the development you can do with ConTeXt (programming in lua and whatnot) would for me not be what is needed for a user manual. What a user manual does is what cont-en.pdf does, but then up to date and complete. G ___________________________________________________________________________________ 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 ___________________________________________________________________________________
