Ideas for improving documentation of ConTeXt

[Jonas Baggett <jonasb@tranquille.ch>]

Hello everyone,

I am new to new to ConTeXt and I was thinking about how to improve 
documentation to help users and then make ConTeXt more appealing. 
Because, if there is one weak point in my eyes with ConTeXt, it is the 
lack of documentation, which is too bad because ConTeXt seems to be 
really great. And google search is also a little tricky, since context 
is a common name. On the other hand, most of the help I found was on the 
wiki, the mailing list, TeX Stack Exchange and some pdf documentations. 
Sometimes, I also faced the problem about the documentation being 
outdated and when I am trying to find the solution on the internet, I 
may have a hard time finding solutions that aren't outdated too. The 
worse is maybe when a command option isn't working anymore with not even 
a warning.

The basic idea I have is a database of ConTeXt documents, where everyone 
can add his own documents. We have also to make it easy to find there 
insightful examples in ConTeXt that will help someone to achieve what he 
is trying to do. Then users, especially beginners, will less likely be 
stuck at one point and looking for hours for a solution and less help 
will be asked on the mailing list too.

Here are the basic concepts about the database :
- When someone adds a document, he can specify the type of the document 
like e.g. report, letter, CV, book, etc. Subcategories could be a good 
idea too, e.g. letters can have a subcategory called cover letters. Some 
extra tags could also be useful, like e.g.: math, luatex, tables, 
positioning, etc when there is some use of the preceding, maybe not 
necessarily essential when the use is only basic.
- If some extra fonts or modules are needed to be installed in order to 
make the example fully work, this could also be specified.
- Search could be done by specifying one or more categories and tags. It 
will also be possible to search all the occurrences in the database of a 
command with optionally a command parameter.
- It will be like a wiki so that everyone could improve the existing 
examples.
- It can be also useful to allow comments, because it is possible that 
an example is close to what someone is trying to do, in which case he 
will look on the comments hoping that there was already someone who 
asked there the question and got answered.
- In order to mitigate the problem with deprecation stuffs after some 
language changes, we could have all the commands and their options 
listed somewhere in the database, then when a command or command 
parameter is getting deprecated, it will be possible to mark it as so 
and provide some hints on how to fix it. After that, all the examples 
that use the deprecated stuffs will get a warning and hints will be 
showed about how to fix them. And since that examples are editable by 
anyone, there won't be hopefully very much of outdated documents.

Here some are possible scenarios about searching in the database  :
- Someone is writing a letter and is trying to move one element (e.g. 
date, his address, receiver address) in another location without any 
success so far. Then he will go to this database, choose letter as 
category and positioning as extra tag and launch the search. Maybe he 
will get about 20 results, then chances are that some of the found 
examples will be doing something close enough to what he's trying to do, 
so that he could analyse the source and understand what he needs to do 
in his case.
- Someone is looking about how to set the background color of a framed 
box. Then he will search occurrences of the uses of the \framed command 
which have color in their arguments. Then by looking at the found 
examples, he will find out that the color is set with the 
backgroundcolor argument and that the background argument need to be set 
to "color" too.

What do you think about the idea ? I believe this could be a good 
complement to the existing ressources.

Have a nice sunday,
Jonas
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