(Fwd) note from Prof Knuth

(Fwd) note from Prof Knuth

[Erik Frambach]

Dear ConTeXt users,

Finally Don Knuth found time to give "4TeX for Windows" a try,
and he even took time to read the (551 pp.) book!
I will not copy his entire comments here, since most of it is
not relevant to this list, but the following piece is:

\startquote

PART 1, THE BOOK:
As an author myself, I know that I very much appreciate receiving
error reports from people who have tried to read my books, even
though I am sad to have made the errors they report. At least they
did try to read the material, which is pretty amazing since this
world contains so many other things to do! Thus I hope you will
be not too unhappy to see the following list of corrections, which
prove that I have read most of the pages of your book.

Before I get into the list, let me also say how much I admire your
courage in writing such a book in a language that is not your mother
tongue. I could not imagine myself ever doing such a thing. Your
use of English is in general quite pleasant except as noted below.

Second, the parts I did not read were chapters 17 and 18. My life is
alas too short to learn the complexities of LaTeX and ConTeXt, since
those programs don't solve any of the problems that I personally
am faced with. Please however tell Hans Hagen that I have always
been extremely impressed by his work on ConTeXt and by the many
incredibly beautiful things that have been done with it already.
Also I think the introduction in Chapter 18 is brilliantly done,
especially with respect to the running example about Hasselt ---
surely this is the best idea for a user manual that I've ever seen,
and it has been worked out here with great taste and wit, a real
tour de force. In spite of this, I got to that chapter at 11pm
when my normal bedtime was 10pm, so I had to skim it and limit my
remarks to infelicities in the documentation of Hasselt; I had no
time to absorb the documentation of ConTeXt itself, although I will
not hesitate to recommend it to my friends.

\stopquote