Re: Re: Best source of ConTeXt documentation?

[Paulo Ney de Souza <desouza@Math.Berkeley.EDU>]

    >From ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl  Mon Aug  2 08:46:53 2004
    >From: "Patrick Gundlach" <patrick@gundla.ch>
    >To: ntg-context@ntg.nl
    >Subject: [NTG-context] Re: Best source of ConTeXt documentation?
    >
    >Oh come on, this is completely crap. The people at PRAGMA (i.e. Hans)
    >share ConTeXt, wich is the holy grail that PRAGMA is based on
    >(besides the knowledge). It is such a generous gift to the community.
    >Please think about if you write stuff like that.

I realize better that you do Hans contibutions to the Open Source community
and I never complained about the sharing of ConTeXt, which is indeed the 
best typesetting system I have seen. You are taking my comment into a 
completely different context, pun not intended!

    >You are right, that not all (only few) manuals are available in .tex
    >format. See pdftex manual and the magazines. Putting source
    >code online needs time, a lot of time. Source code needs to get
    >documented. And I don't know Hans very well, but I'd guess that his
    >day only has 24h.
    >
    >There are already some styles in the ConTeXt wiki. And there are
    >styles that come with the distribution. 

The discussion is not about styles, it is about examples and how-to.

    >Why reverse-engineer? Just cook up the style you want. If you have
    >questions doing this, ask on the ConTeXt list. If you are ready, put
    >the style onto the Wiki. The styles at pragma are very good, but
    >definitely not the only way to go. Making a good style is not
    >copy/paste. It is a matter of experience. Experience is something you
    >have to gain yourself.

We are not talking about experience and or copy/paste, if you are assuming 
that I don't have the experience or that the guy that posted the initial
message wants to copy and paste, again you are on the wrong track.

    >And yes, it is time for us to put examples online. But the ConTeXt
    >community is still rather small. So there won't be many results in a
    >short time.

I certainly will welcome the day we have a minimal how-to posted in there.

    >You can do the first step. Go to the wiki, edit a page that states
    >your questions regarding style development. Put a table of contents
    >or something similar there, which steps you would like to see, which
    >things you would like to have explained and so on. After that "we"
    >(the more experienced ConTeXt users) can fill in the gaps. And
    >finally we all have a small manual on style design. This is much
    >better than being so aggressive on the unwillingness to share source.
    >
    >Patrick

I'll give it a try, the wiki is certainly the way to go ...

Paulo Ney