Re: Manual (English) Update soon?

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

On 12/29/06, Douglas Philips wrote:
> On 2006 Dec 28, at 5:00 PM, Aditya Mahajan indited:
> > On Thu, 28 Dec 2006, Douglas Philips wrote:
> >> cont-eni.pdf (ConTeXt the manual by Hans Hagen, November 12th, 2001).
> >
> > That is the most up to date manual and should get you started for most
> > of the basic features. The features that are not in the manual are
> > mostly related to specific needs, so you can get around even if you do
> > not know about them. Some My Ways discuss some of these undocumented
> > features.
>
> The undocumented features are documented in My Ways? :-)

Esp. the two MyWay's written by the author who mentioned that ;)
If you write a lot of maths, it's worth reading them.
plain TeX math is still valid, but there were some additions which can
simplify writing and enumerating your exotic formulas.

See http://wiki.contextgarden.net/My_Way

Most other MyWay's deal with fonts.

> I found a few of those also, and it is very confusing to a newbie
> (such as myself) to figure out what is old and valid and what is old
> and not-so-valid...

I don't have a good overview, but I don't know that many
"not-so-valid" things. Most "drastic" differences might have been made
in the area of fonts (and things will probably have to be improved
further once there will be native OpenType support available), textext
should better be replaced with \sometxt{} in metapost graphics and
you're discouraged to use the Dutch interface for low-level commands
;)

I don't remember much more than that. There have been drastic
improvements behind the scenes, but that should go unnoticed to the
user (except for noting that ConTeXt now runs much faster than three
years ago). Old things are still valid, there might only be some new
things that you might not know about once you've read the manual.
(plain) TeX is about 25 and still "valid". Only that there are "a few
commands available out there" which can simplify things.

Mojca