Re: Ideas for improving documentation of ConTeXt

[Jonas Baggett <jonasb@tranquille.ch>]

Hello Henri,

Le 09. 10. 16 à 21:31, Henri Menke a écrit :
> please don't be disappointed but you are not the first person to suggest such a thing.  You may now ask, why doesn't such a thing exist then?  Well, the basic answer is, go ahead and implement it.
I won't go ahead and implement it if I am the only one who would think 
it is a good idea. That's why I asked for some feedback. It happens 
sometimes that I could have an idea that looks great in my eyes, but 
then seems a little less shiny after hearing some feedback. But since I 
wasn't the first person to suggest such a thing, It seems to me that my 
idea goes in the right direction, isn't it ? It doesn't mean that no 
improvement is needed, and it still need to be implemented.

> Most probably no one else will volunteer to do it and especially the people from PRAGMA surely have better things to do. They merely develop and use ConTeXt (...)
Here I don't agree. People from PRAGMA are probably better at 
developping ConTeXt than starting in parallel a new project like that, 
but it doesn't mean that this idea is necessarly not worth considering. 
I wasn't either suggesting that they should be the people who start 
implementing the idea.
> (...) and were so kind as to provide us a huge bunch of documentation already (http://pragma-ade.nl/document-1.htm).
Yes I just saw that you are right about the documentation, they have 
already made a huge work on that. I was maybe too quick about my 
conclusion, I am sorry if I did offend those who have already make all 
that work. I was actually doing a cover letter in ConTeXt and since I 
wasn't able to find uptodate informations about some of the commands I 
was a little frustrated. But yes the letter module is third party and I 
just saw in the wiki that it is said to be still in developpment, so 
interface changes are to be expected and not necessarly all documented. 
Since I am new to ConTeXt, my views on ConTeXt documentation got biased. 
But now I am pretty happy with the results I have with my document, so 
most of the troubles are behind, I guess :-).

On the other hand, some of the documentation still need to be updated. 
Since ConTeXt is quick to evolue, having uptodate documentation would be 
a huge task and I also understand that it may not be the most 
interesting part for developpers ;-). My proposition was about to 
mitigate that problem with making accessible examples with some advanced 
search to quickly find relevant results.

Maybe someday ConTeXt will be more mature and have a more stable 
interface, then it would be easier to have uptodate documentation. But 
it is only the analysis of someone who is only starting to know ConTeXt, 
so I won't assume to be totally correct.

Cheers,
Jonas
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