Re: beginners manual

[Otared KAVIAN <otared@gmail.com>]

Hi Hans,

Thank you for your great work.
Regarding the beginners manual your are going to update, I have two
or three suggestions.
To begin with, I think we should designate a volunteer group of
people on this list to do some tasks in "parallel":

1) Since the installation of ConTeXt seems to be not so easy for
everyone, we should have at least three subgroups of people
experimenting, and then explaining, how to install and update ConTeXt
on Linux, Windows, MacOS X.
Once each subgroup has carried out the experimentation of the "How
to..." instructions, they would send them to you so that you can
include them in the Beginners Manual (abbreviated BM in the sequel...).
It is important to include in each subgroup a "wizard" and an
"amateur beginner": otherwise the "How to..." instructions may result
in something not really usable by real beginners.
For my part I am volunteering to be a (rather dumb...) beginner
regarding installation on MacOS X, and its use with XeTeX.
The same observation applies for the use of ConTeXt with non roman
languages under various operating systems.

2) We should divide the BM in $n$ parts ($n \geq 2$... but maybe $n=10
$) and designate one or two individuals for each part to test ALL the
codes and examples you give in the BM to make sure that they work
fine with a "basic" install of ConTeXt.

3) Two great features of ConTeXt are its versatility regarding
Metapost and presentations. In the BM these features should be
presented in a transparent way, since most beginners would not have
the patience or the technical knowledge of going through the source
files.

Best regards: OK

On 21 nov. 2005, at 23:03, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm going to clean up the beginners manual (at least the source
> code) so i think this s a good moment to pick up the 'translation'
> thread
>
> So the question is:
>
> - what can go out
> - what should go in
> - what should be updated
>
> as well as:
>
> - who will participate (in translation)
> - how to deal with localization (maybe dedicated language related
> chapters)
>
> Hans