Re: New Member Introductory Rant

[Henning Hraban Ramm <hraban@fiee.net>]

Am 2008-03-31 um 17:33 schrieb Aditya Mahajan:
>>
>> "How-to-find-your-way-thru-the-source Tutorial for total newbie".
> The first thing that you need to know is the file where a particular
> command is defined. You can search the source tree on  
> contextgarden; or
> grep the files in your computer. After a while you will remember which
> file defines a particular command.

In case someone overread this:

"You can search the source tree on contextgarden"
http://source.contextgarden.net/

And besides the wiki pages, a lot of command documentation is in  
texshow-web:
http://texshow.contextgarden.net/
(Even if unfortunately some groups of commands are missing completely.)

>> On my mac,
>> they are hidden: so, first step, change your visualization  
>> preferences thru a
>> googled script form Terminal.
> Sorry, I have no idea of how things work on a Mac, but it seems  
> strange to
> hide the entire tex tree.

MacOS X hides most of its UNIX stuff from a normal user.
But you can just e.g. "open /usr/" in Terminal and continue to browse  
in Finder.

>>
>> Third, and most important, how to extract infos
>> from sources?
> This is the easiest. Most of ConTeXt commands are written in a  
> consistent
> manner. Hans uses verbose variable names, which makes it easy to  
> "read"
> the code. Also in most cases the source files have lot of comments.

And I guess the ConTeXt sources are the only place where the Dodo  
survived.
(At least every Dodo would feel at home between all those dodododos.)
;-)

Greetlings from Lake Constance!
Hraban
---
http://www.fiee.net/texnique/
http://wiki.contextgarden.net
https://www.cacert.org (I'm an assurer)

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