Re: New Member Introductory Rant

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Andrea Valle wrote:

>> 
>> By reading the source :)
>> Joking of course ... but not entirely.
>> 
>
>
>
> Yes, that's an important point. Many times the options I'm searching for are 
> not documented: so, or I'm able to find an example in wiki/mailing list or 
> probably it would be easy to take a look to the sources, I guess.
> I know it's far from being polite, but really I'd like to have a 
> "How-to-find-your-way-thru-the-source Tutorial for total newbie".

The first thing that you need to know is the file where a particular 
command is defined. You can search the source tree on contextgarden; or 
grep the files in your computer. After a while you will remember which 
file defines a particular command.

> On my mac, 
> they are hidden: so, first step, change your visualization preferences thru a 
> googled script form Terminal.

Sorry, I have no idea of how things work on a Mac, but it seems strange to 
hide the entire tex tree.

> Second, the (in)famous tex tree structure is 
> far from being clear for me.

Almost all of ConTeXt files are in $TEXMF/tex/context/base (fonts, are of 
course a different issue)

> Third, and most important, how to extract infos 
> from sources?

This is the easiest. Most of ConTeXt commands are written in a consistent 
manner. Hans uses verbose variable names, which makes it easy to "read" 
the code. Also in most cases the source files have lot of comments.

Aditya
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