On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 3:10 AM, Michael Saunders <odrad...@gmail.com> 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. cont-en & metafun are real manuals for mkii. And yes, mkii is almost 10years old , and maybe some options of some macros are changed What do you mean as "real manual" ?
> > 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. mkiv is still in development. If one knows mkii, then mk.pdf and luatexref-x.pdf are important to help in understanding mkiv, but it's not enough . One must also knowns lua, fontforge , opentype, unicode utf-8 TeX internal, xml ... Actually mkiv is not for end user but it will be for sure in the future , ~2012 estimated. > > 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. One important point of mkiv are opentype fonts. It's really hard in LaTeX to manage opentype fonts (remember the Adobe produce only opentype fonts), and it's also hard in mkii --- but better. mkiv actually already manage opentype fonts in a decent way, if one compares with mkii. Another point is Lua (a "traditional" programming language) as a tool for macro writer, and I can assure that it' more fun/productive to use Lua than TeX in some situations (eg parsing) even if TeX side of ConTeXt is still indispensable (and will remain). Context is not and doesn't seem a secret club: "normal" programming is hard, programming with TeX is harder than "normal" programming , typographic programming is a kind of magic -- no books other than TexBook. But in the end one must sit down and write his own code, and the codebase is the best source for learning. ConTeXt is a format for typographic programming --- maybe not user friendly for and end user; LaTeX is a format for end user --- not so good for general typographic programming . -- luigi ___________________________________________________________________________________ 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 ___________________________________________________________________________________
