Re: SF project and docs (was: ConTeXt-Wiki)

[Maurice Diamantini <diam@ensta.fr>]

Le 23 juin 04, à 18:59, Henning Hraban Ramm a écrit :


> And, Maurice, remember: Is there any complete LaTeX manual?
> No, there isn't - there are lots of books on different levels,
> most of them keep errors or describe old or obsolete packages or
> techniques.

Yes, there is some reference books
   LateX from Lamport
   A guide to Latex 2e
   ...
which all are **suffisant** to do complete scientific documents
- mathematiques (not mathxml, which has never be done for beeing 
written by hand!)
- biblio (m-bib)

The latex reference book is very small because it does't describe
any extension.
A ConTeXt reference book would be much like an uptodate
cont-eni.pdf manual. It would be comparable to the couple
"LaTeX Lamport + Latex Compagnon"


For me, some of the top documentations are :
    gettingStartWithContext
    LaTeXtoContext.pdf
    refcontextbook (alias cont-eni for the 8.3 system)
    metafun-s.pdf
    the m-bib  module and its doc
    the m-nath module and its doc
    up-004.p.pdf for table

But the reference cont-eni.pdf doesn't talk about math nor biblio.
Also there is several means to do tables, and it seams
that the two main context reference documents (gettingStart and
cont-eni.pdf) doesn't talk about the same table system.
Morever, neither of them talk about the last most supported
table system which seams to be enattab.pdf!!


> And every latex package has its own docs that you should read - some
> are books itself (e.g. komascript).
Doen't know about it, doen't need it, so I'm glab it is not in
the latex manuals :-)

> So there's a lot more in the "basic" ConTeXt manual than in most
> LaTeX books! Sure, it could always be more & better...
> I agree that the whole plethora of single docs isn't really
> overviewable. But otherwise they're a nice demonstration of
> ConTeXt's capabilities - and I guess Hans meant them to be.

It's a good thing that additive fonctionnalities, or full reference
of specialised features are not included in the standard manual,
I've never asked that the metafun book should be include in
the contextbook!

I think the simplest thing to do is a to make a lite introduction
documentation for use as a guide about which docs should be seen
as reference (which table to use, how to to biblio, ...)

Also, I think yet that a litly modified version of the
contextbook.pdf, by adding the new table, nath and biblio
module, should be sufficiant for most peoples.

A year ago, I thought that context could become the
real "latex3" project,
But now, I think that the context is missing for some
universities support (latex developpers, user documentation
for students, ...).
An uptodate documentation could help!

Cordialement,

-- Maurice