Re: cont-enp.pdf on lulu

[Gerben Wierda <Gerben.Wierda@rna.nl>]

On Jul 29, 2008, at 2:44 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

> Hi Gerben,
>
> On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Gerben Wierda wrote:
>
>> This should be based on (imo) merging the content of the excursion  
>> and
>> the manual.
>
> Here (and sometime earlier in the thread) you have suggested that  
> you find
> the scattered documentation of ConTeXt confusing and would like to  
> see an
> exhaustive manual. I agree with that in principle, but still believe  
> that
> excursion and the manual should be separate. The manual can be a  
> superset
> of excursion, but there needs to be "beginner's manual".
>
> If there is a exhaustive manual, it will be *huge*. An exhaustive  
> manual
> on math will be of the size of a book; so would an exhaustive manual  
> on
> metapost/mp-lib (think of an updated metafun manual). I can also  
> imagine
> an exhaustive manual for fonts to be big (how do we handle fonts for
> lua/xetex/pdftex; how do we handle fonts for different scripts,  
> etc.); and
> fairly large manuals for floats (three four mechanism for tables,  
> about 20
> ways to move around floats, etc.), critical editions (I don't know the
> status of the proposed module), bib module (the user manual for  
> biblatex,
> which is similar in spirit to bib module, is huge), etc.
>
> So, if we want exhaustive documentation and  a beginner's
> manual, I see that we only have the option of expanding on the  
> excursion
> to have an upto date beginner's manual, expanding on the manual to  
> have an
> upto date (but not exhaustive) user manual, and have a series of
> specialized exhaustive manuals. But that will still mean that the
> documentation is scattered.
>
> The way I see it, we can update the documentation, but not really  
> solve
> the problem of scattered documentation :-(

Before things balloon to a size it is not feasible anymore, I would  
suggest keeping manual&reference apart from introductory documents  
like excursion or 'beginners manual'. And I would be very happy if  
there was only one decent manual&reference maintained by a group of  
people, complete and up to date. thers could maintain a beginner's  
manual on the basis of that, but add the maintenance of a second  
beginner's manual and suddenly one needs to maintain two things. This  
cannot completely be avoided (as also in the manual the same thing  
will be in many places as technique 1 is part of the example for  
technique 2, etc.).

At first, I would suggest that the documentation project would  
consider itself with one thing: a 'user & reference manual' for  
ConTeXt. If that succeeds and people have energy left they can do a  
simplified beginner's manual.

Note: personally, I think a beginner's manual could be part of the big  
manual. Say, an 'excursion' chapter or a 'beginner's section' at the  
start of each chapter..

G
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