[NTG-context] An announcement of my new book.

[SirColeman via ntg-context <ntg-context@ntg.nl>]

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Greetings all. I have a passion for typesetting. I found that currently the best typesetting systems are those that are based on TeX. Of them, there are LaTeX, and ConTeXt.
LaTeX is very well documented and popular; ConTeXt, on the other hand, is apparently very powerful and capable, but is not as well documented.

There are things that are spectacularly well documented, others that only show hints, and leave it up to the user to figure things out on their own, and others still that won't even compile on a more recent version of ConTeXt (apparently the proper way to access a counter's value in ConTeXt is to use \getnumber or \convertednumber, and not \getcounter. That's just an example).

I thus thought, as an exercise in typesetting, in writing, and also to help the ConTeXt documentation, to write a new book, a large book, that teaches the details of how ConTeXt on a lower level works, allowing one to understand how to utilize low level typesetting features for anything more sophisticated than a simple book or article. By lower level, I mean how things like heads, items, references, alignment, tables, etc., work. Also, I would like a book that teaches things like how to program it using lua, how to understand and utilize the underlying engine itself (the low level LuaMetaTeX), how to even use DocBook with ConTeXt, etc.

(I do realize that there already are manuals for lua in ConTeXt and on LuaMetaTeX, etc., and manuals on various different parts of ConTeXt, and I'll certainly be learning from them whenever their particular topic comes, but I reserve the opportunity to rewrite parts of these manuals for this book, as is necessary for the book's purpose, perhaps referencing these manuals for further details.)

In particular, I want to go a step beyond the book "A not so short introduction to ConTeXt Mark IV", and teach the particularly advanced features, where there is sparse information. Particularly, it's meant to serve as one complete reference, instead of having to hunt for different manuals, which explain things differently, and with the consequence that it's hard to find a particular piece of information because its scattered around so many different places.

This book should serve as the one and only final documentation that you would need. It would contain everything in a highly cohesive format, in one place, and make particular pieces of information particularly easy to find. I realize that this is a very ambitious undertaking, but I find that a unified source of information is better than information with varying levels of quality scattered across more places than one can hold in his head.

I just have one question: What is all the necessary material to understand and utilize the low level TeX programming language itself? That is, what do I need to read to learn to be able to read the ConTeXt source code itself (which is written in TeX---and lua, but I can help myself in that regard)? Is the "Low Level TeX" set of manuals all that I'll need, or will I need other sources of information too? And also, is it worth learning Plain TeX, and reading The TeXbook, or is not necessary?

And, I'm grateful to have an alternative to LaTeX. It's certainly promising, but I would like to help make it appealing, by making it easy to learn and master it, and provide a single source of information. I'm grateful for having ConTeXt.

P.S. If I have bugs to file, should I file them on this mailing list, or on the dev-context@ntg.nl mailing list?

And, to all beginner ConTeXt users: What would you like to see covered in this book?

Thanks.

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