Re: The ConTeXt Companion

[Ulf Martin <ulfmartin@web.de>]

Patrick Gundlach schrieb:
>> Now, if we had "The ConTeXt Companion" ...
> 
> ... ConTeXt would probably stabilize, which IMHO is not a good thing.
> One thing I really love ConTeXt for is the speed new techniques are
> adopted (pdf features, luatex,...) One day we might have a ConTeXt
> MKII book for those who are afraid of swithing to pdftex2.

I don't think that The ConTeXt Companion (TCC) would halt ConTeXt
development. The LaTeX Companion (TLC) didn't do that for LaTeX. Now,
TLC was in 1st edition from 1994 to 2004, meaning that it was quite
outdated in the end (one reason for me, btw, to look around wether there
are other options to do teXing, and discovering ConTeXt). But it kept
the reference situation in a well defined three step state:
(1) look into one of the small LaTeX guides;
(2) look into TLC;
(3) look into package docs, internet etc. (which is, of course messy).
My experience is that one rarely needed to go past (2).

With ConTeXt there is, of course, the "excursion" (equiv. to (1)) and
the manual (2), but many important issues (the phantastic XML processing
capabilities, bibliography stuff, typography, font management,...) are
not quite complete or covered elsewhere (i.e. situation 3).

Ulf