Re: PhD Thesis in ConTeXt

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2008, Alan BRASLAU wrote:

> My question to the mailing list: is this task structured? Is this being
> managed by anyone?

Unfortunately, not. Taco started working on the documentation and spent 
more than a month rewriting the font documentation. Most of the old manual 
is now under svn with a open documentation license, so anyone can 
contribute. See http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextman/ for 
details. But, Taco is busy with luatex, and no one else has contributed 
much (note to self: look at the documentation again).

I had decided to work on the wiki, but only thing that I have done so far 
is reorganize the front page. I have been thinking about working on the 
installation page, but ... (insert favorite excuse)

> Perhaps this was discussed at the User Meeting last August. I would have liked
> to participate (had I been available)...

It was discussed extensively. From what I understood, the conclusion was 
that someone from the community needs to take the initiative to *maintain* 
the manuals. Take the big manual for example. It is fairly complete, but 
some of the documentation is outdated (e.g., it recommends 
\setupindenting[big] instead of \setupindenting[big,yes], there are a few 
more options that have been added to itemize, descriptions, enumerations, 
etc.). So, in most cases, only minor corrections are needed to bring it up 
to date.

We need someone to go through the manual, point out which parts are not 
clear and check if all the commands work as presented. And try to correct 
things if possible, or ask on the mailing list for someone else to correct 
certain sections. Someone needs to manage the whole process. Hans and Taco 
do not have the time to maintain the documentation. So far, no one has 
taken this responsibility. One does not have to be a context expert to do 
this. Just be able to devote some time to the documentation every other 
week or so.

I feel that one area where context documentation is lacking is that most 
of the documentation is by Hans. In Latex, there are many introductory 
documentations by different authors. This is useful, because everyone has 
a different style of presentation, and different users may find some 
styles easier to understand than others. Right now, if someone does not 
like Hans's style of writing, he/she is stuck. We need more people to 
write about ConTeXt.

Aditya
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