Re: [NTG-context] State of documentation of ConTeXt?

On 7/15/2014 11:59 AM, Gerben Wierda wrote:

On 14 Jul 2014, at 19:29, Hans Hagen mailto:pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:

...

quite some sub-systems are described in their own manuals (fonts, tables, xml, ...) and these manuals are quite up to date (and easier to maintain than one big fat manual

also, additional documentation is something that users need to participate in (just pick a topic)

even if it has high priority, that doesn't mean that those involved have much free time left to do that next to their regular work (as usual most development is done in spare time)

so, patience is needed,

I like ConTeXt (still do, I liked its approach when I first encountered it). But the project is more the ongoing private tinkering of a small in-crowd (that communicates with some followers).

ConTeXt is managed a bit like a small group of researchers sharing a couple of complex and undocumented models/programs and tinkering with them as they go along. It’s an activity without formal design, but with a lot of trial-and-error/testing.

Given that status (and the fact that it has had that status for over a /decennium/), I don’t expect it to ever become a serious product that is (semi-)professionally managed. I prefer content over management every day, but something like this needs some minimal management. That requires both time (=money) and capabilities. Besides, the tinkering researchers may not be inclined to do that, they want to tinker.

BTW, you can’t be serious asking the /users/ to provide the documentation, can you?

Well, you need to keep this in mind: - we are using it ourselves (already for a long time) so we depend on it and so we keep it going - we spend most of our company time on development and support .. and we live with that - our roadmap does *not* include getting big (with open source as stepping stone), *not* messing with users by selling ourselves after a while, and *not* splitting between 'context for users' and 'context professional or enterprise', so everyone gets what we have (which also means that documentation will always be behind!) - we have no big projects that pay for development (from which we can then work on documentation) .. in fact, our projects are rather niche and special - we're quite satisfied with the users (they are demanding and creative) ... context never aimed at one-time-users Now, we don't ask users to provide documentation, but on the other hand, if you look at latex, lost of documentation starts at users. Maybe some day I find more time ... Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------