Re: Manual (English) Update soon?

[Douglas Philips <dgou@mac.com>]

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? :-)
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...

> Just give it a shot. The is "Latex in proper context" by Berend de
> Boer which can help in the transition. The general information on
> http://wiki.contextgarden.net/From_LaTeX_to_ConTeXt is also useful.

Cool, thanks!

> Context is very stable, and much better documented than latex. You can
> start with small documents in context to get comfortable with it. The
> best documents to start are those where you do not have a strict
> formatting requirement, so that you do not need to worry if you can
> not get something working.

:-) That would be ideal. However, I'm looking to change horses  
because the documents I am already producing (newsletters for local  
groups (all volunteer)) are straining at what LaTeX wants me to do.
So, I've been contemplating whether I should move "up" the  
abstraction ladder to ConTeXt or "down"
to plain TeX and really learn to build the world from boxes and  
glue. :-)
I'd rather move up. :-) :-)


>> (IIRC, Hans is also a core team member of LuaTeX, so perhaps I should
>> just suck it up with LaTeX until LuaTeX is viable?)
>
> LuaTeX is not a replacement for LaTeX. It is a replacement for pdfTeX.
> ...
> pending feature requests getting implemented. So, if you are planning
> on switching to context, there is no real need to wait for luatex.

OK. Wasn't sure...


> HTH,
> Aditya

Yes, it did/does, thank you!

--Doug