Re: The ConTeXt book

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 08:47, Alan BRASLAU wrote:
> On Saturday 03 April 2010 07:37:36 Gour wrote:
>>
>> However, when I ask somewhere about the support for ConTeXt I'm
>> getting answers like: "This is the project which has only 5 or 6
>> users. Who actually uses it? Use LaTeX!" :-(
>
> You can use MS-Word - it has a *huge* user base!

I really love that answer :) :) :) And it's definitely true. Much more
true than the ConTeXt-to-LaTeX ratio :)

ConTeXt has a bus-factor of 1. Well, if you ask me, the whole LaTeX
core has bus-factor 0 (apart from some well-maintaned packages; and
even those packages usually have bus-factor just a tiny fraction above
1; including TikZ, tex4ht, ...). If you want full support and more
guarantee with a higher bus-factor, you should better choose Adobe or
Microsoft products and I really mean it. For me it's just fun to
browse the sources from time to time ...

It is definitely true that a manual is needed (everyone agrees with
that), but you need to keep in mind that Hans makes a living with what
he does and we can be extremely happy that he releases ConTeXt
publically at all (he could just as well keep it in private for
himself and his company). Writing a good manual could easily take
one-man-year or more, so if some company is willing to pay him for
that, he (or some other almost-developer) would probably do it.

What nobody here realizes that main developers of jQuery or any other
tools probably don't answer dozens of mails daily to beginners'
questions on the mailing lists.

As already said: anyone is free to start writing a manual by himself.
People to help will join later ... Just start.

Mojca
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