Re: State of documentation of ConTeXt?

[Ulrike Fischer <news3@nililand.de>]

Am Sun, 20 Jul 2014 23:07:32 +0200 schrieb Gerben Wierda:

>> 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. 

> If a tool needs 50.000 pages to document its use, you are in
> trouble (in more ways than one).

Well imho the LaTeX-documentations could add up easily to this
number, probably more: e.g. source3 has more then 700 pages, tikz
more than 1000, etc.

So imho Mojca's estimate is probably quite sound. But naturally such
a reference is not the same as an introductionary book like the
latex guide or the latex companion. Such books have to select and
layout their informations -- and if it weren't possible to write
such a book about context then you are in trouble.  


> I would immediately buy any book that explains ConTeXt such as the
> books that are there for LaTeX. But then, LaTeX is moribund and
> doesn’t change at all. An easier target.

As you wrote in a later posting: many books about latex are in parts
outdated as they couldn't keep up with the development e.g. of tikz,
biblatex, expl3 etc. So I don't see how you can claim that "latex
doesn't change at all". 

Beside this I don't believe that context is changing so much that it
would be impossible to write a book about it: I doubt that all the
people who uses context in their daily work would like it if they
had to adapt their document regularly to some new syntax.

-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/

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