Re: Manual (English) Update soon?

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On 12/28/06, Douglas Philips wrote:
> Hello again,
>
> I've just recently tried to "get up to speed" on ConTeXt by reading
> what I could find on the web, including
> cont-eni.pdf (ConTeXt the manual by Hans Hagen, November 12th, 2001).
>
> Recent activity on this list, discussing the Debian packaging, says
> (and I commented on this a few days ago in another thread):
> "ConTeXt is developed rapidly, often in response to requests from the
> friendly user community."

Well, the ConTeXt manual is one of the most stable components of
ConTeXt indeed ;)

But consider it from the bright side:
yes, it's still fully usable (after two years of using ConTeXt it's
still hard to do anything without using it), everything mentioned
there should still work (unless there has been some bug introduced in
the mean time) and the major functionality has been there at that time
already.

Yes, there have been many improvements since then, but if I'm looking
for a particular one, there's still google, grep (my best friend) and
a friendly mailing list which has been following ConTeXt development
for the last five years. Major things have been mentioned in one of
the other hundred of the manuals (nice reading for long rainy nights),
additional options can sometimes only be found in source.

That's surely no excuse for not refreshing the manual, but there's no
excuse for not sharing your experience on the wiki or web version of
texshow either.


But to be honest: what if you were using LaTeX? I don't know any page
or book where all the packages would be described. Sure, the best,
most widely used package make it into books with time, but for the
others you can't do anything without mailing lists and search engines
either. And then you learn to use one package which becomes obsolete
and unmaintained, so after two years when you finally become
comfortable with it you figure out that it would make sense to switch
to another better package, the same story after two years ... At least
that's what I experience with packages for graphics: I've learnt
picTeX with troubles just to figure out that it's completely useless,
then there was some other don't-remember-which package, still too poor
to do anything there, then I finally discovered PSTricks which became
kind-of-obsolete with pdfTeX or XeTeX. The same story with just about
any package for creating slides or changing page layout, headers,
footers (and they all took a lot of time to learn how to use them),
not to mention the changes in base LaTeX (documentstyle ->
documentclass{article} -> Komma script) and the fact that most
packages become unmaintained after they have been written.

> And so I am wondering if ConTeXt is still too fresh...

It's always full of surprizes. But what do you mean with "too fresh"?
If you're worried that your colleagues don't have the latest version
of ConTeXt installed (and thus won't be able to compile your code)
then you're probably right. (But if you want to use the latest packeg
from LaTeX, there's even more chance that they won't have it. In
ConTeXt you know at least that downloading one thing should suffice.)

> and if I'll
> have any chance of figuring out what/how to use it without having
> been on this list for the past 4+ years...

Take it from the bright side: even if you were on the list, you
wouldn't have time to follow it unless you were a student ;)

And take it from the bright side again: tetex on most linux
distributions is just as old as the manual, so you wouldn't be missing
much ;)

> (IIRC, Hans is also a core team member of LuaTeX, so perhaps I should
> just suck it up with LaTeX until LuaTeX is viable?)

No reason for, as Aditya already mentioned.

In my opinion "It makes no sense to wait for solar-energy car before
you start doing your driver's licence. Unless you intend to design or
produce cars, you shouldn't even notice the difference."

Mojca