These are all my opinions, of course.
> > The lack of proper end user documentation is one of the main problems > with ConTeXt. Eventually, actually one of the main problems is the lack of people like Wolfgang Schuster . For sure the things can be better if everyone uses the wiki to search and update documentations or write solutions. There was talk of a book about ConTeXt but I haven't > heard about that one for a while. Probably impossible given the lack > of stability (aka ongoing development) of ConTeXt. > mkii is not so instable. mkiv is under active development, but I'm using it for a catalog from october of last year. > > ConTeXt could become very popular in teh TeX world if it had: > - A decent versioning support (where you can get documentation and > code that match and not code from 2008 with documentation from 2001) > - Side-by-side development of manuals and code > More or less, TeX and Latext suffer of the same problem. > As it is now, the developing community is restricted to the few gurus > who can hack the ConTeXt source code. >From what I know, the developer of ConTeXt is Hans Hagen. There are some texnicians who help in debuggings; there are some people (wolfgang,mojca, aditja,...) who know context better than others and offers their support on the mailing list (we also need more people like them) . BTW, we are lucky that developing is firmly on the hands of Hans. No other sane person will try to > release and support something on such a volatile foundation. It's no true. What > ConTeXt looks to me currently, is a personal swiss army knife of a few > people who have no need for end user documentation (so it never > arrives). ConTeXt/mkiv actually is the most advanced macro_packages_system build on top of luatex, the successor of pdftex; it's a serious competitor in the world of typesetting systems. With lua build in, will attract more 'traditional' programmers than tex/latex/pdftex etc. It's an ongoing process of development, because it's not easy to develop luatex-mplib-mkiv in synch (and taco is another giant ) It can be true that actually context is hard to learn, but I don't think that this is the right moment for a book. And to be clear: without luatex, TeX will not survive. Only my 1cent. -- luigi
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