Re: Best source of ConTeXt documentation?

["Patrick Gundlach" <patrick@gundla.ch>]

Hello, 

> This is one of the sore points of ConTeXt and of the development
> effort. People at Pragma are willing to show off but not willing
> to share code and teach by example... contrary to most opensource
> projects I have seen.

Oh come on, this is completely crap. The people at PRAGMA (i.e. Hans)
share ConTeXt, wich is the holy grail that PRAGMA is based on
(besides the knowledge). It is such a generous gift to the community.
Please think about if you write stuff like that.

You are right, that not all (only few) manuals are available in .tex
format. See pdftex manual and the magazines. Putting source
code online needs time, a lot of time. Source code needs to get
documented. And I don't know Hans very well, but I'd guess that his
day only has 24h.

There are already some styles in the ConTeXt wiki. And there are
styles that come with the distribution. 

> Maybe it is time for us to start an group to reverse-engineer some
> of these files and post them into a public archive.

Why reverse-engineer? Just cook up the style you want. If you have
questions doing this, ask on the ConTeXt list. If you are ready, put
the style onto the Wiki. The styles at pragma are very good, but
definitely not the only way to go. Making a good style is not
copy/paste. It is a matter of experience. Experience is something you
have to gain yourself.

And yes, it is time for us to put examples online. But the ConTeXt
community is still rather small. So there won't be many results in a
short time.


Paulo,

You can do the first step. Go to the wiki, edit a page that states
your questions regarding style development. Put a table of contents
or something similar there, which steps you would like to see, which
things you would like to have explained and so on. After that "we"
(the more experienced ConTeXt users) can fill in the gaps. And
finally we all have a small manual on style design. This is much
better than being so aggressive on the unwillingness to share source.


Patrick

(btw: looking for some beta testers for a new service)

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