Re: Ideas for restructuring the ConTeXt garden?

From: Ian Lawrence <physics.rooted@gmail.com>
To: mailing list for ConTeXt users <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
Subject: Re: Ideas for restructuring the ConTeXt garden?
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:27:32 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <BANLkTi=ggvUEeLZ6o-jsjKJFTebC-eiNuQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=xkpQOq19JgskonA_PyPzd5qhhojJAin1WG5Ez@mail.gmail.com>

Well, I am a beginner. I have just lost 2 hours trying to do something
which ought to be simple. Perhaps now I have spent 10's of hours
working at my understanding, yet still I have to look up the simplest
essentials, often. And I think knowing what kind of things it is, and
where one might look are necessary lubricants for this process.

I think you probably cannot have too many (documented) examples.
Things which are very obvious to some , are not so obvious to others.

And if too much has to be done by trial and error then everything is
very slow... Very very slow.

For me, there is too much that is cryptic in the Wiki. Often I read
the entry and am no wiser. Each word is well formed, but there is no
mental model emerging. Maybe a wiki is good place for archiving,
curating and exchanging tips, but just not so good for learning from
scratch.

The 'Starting with Context' pdf I find very good, but for later work
all kinds of things are 'bad style', 'deprecated' etc. So maybe a way
in to thinking about what to do is to consider how the newer user
might get a handle on what Context is really for, and why one might
prefer it to manually typesetting documents...

Kind regards

Ian

2011/3/16 Vedran Miletić <rivanvx@gmail.com>:
> 2011/3/14 Carlos Breton Besnier <breton.carlos@gmail.com>
>>
>>
>> 2011/3/12 Florian Wobbe <Florian.Wobbe@awi.de>
>>>
>>> Maybe we should start a discussion in a new thread to find out:
>>>
>>> 5) how to better promote context to new/latex users?
>>>
>>
>> I think is needed a installation guide for non-technical. A guide not only
>> for programmers but a simple guide for dummies. Like me, I am no-developer,
>> I write law books. Latex installation and update is very simple for
>> beginners. On Windows with MiKTeX, everyone can write very soon his first
>> document. Not so with ConTeXt, except old stand-alone installation. It's
>> cause of frustration and after several attempts they give up. Then they
>> return to LaTeX (like me too).
>
> Well, with TeX Live 2010 it's very simple to use MkII with both pdfTeX and
> XeTeX. Hopefully, some future version of TeX Live (2011?) will offer the
> same for MkIV. Script is already there, it's just not integrated with
> TeXworks in TeX Live yet.
>
> Regards,
>
> Vedran Miletić
>
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If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
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archive  : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
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