I would buy it too... Marcus Vinicius --------------------------------- How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger’s low PC-to-Phone call rates.

And me too. No doubt! Ricard Roca

On Friday 29 September 2006 10:19, gnwiii@gmail.com wrote:

On 9/28/06, John R. Culleton wrote:

...

What is needed now for greater acceptance of Context is not new features but a new manual, perhaps a multi volume set with a common index. The 2001 manual is great, but many of the features discussed daily here are not in it. One must chase around the wiki and the individual manuals like "details", and that is not satisfactory from the point of view of the new user. Most of us have memorized the locations of key information but newcomers have not.

I don't agree that lack of a current manual is a big problem for potential users of ConteXt. In my experience, the biggest problem is with the 3rd party tools (perl, ghostscript, ruby) on Win32 and legacy commercial unix (where ruby is not provided and the system perl will be a very old version).

Interesting. There are minimal Context distros for each of the major platforms. Does the Win verson include the missing compilers?

You can write simple LaTeX documents without working 3rd party tools (MikTeX-2.5 seems to provide ghostscript), but you need perl and ruby before you can format anything in ConTeXt. There should be some tools to check the functioning and versions of ghostscript, perl, and ruby. A VMWare player appliacance might be helpful for people with current Win32 systems (e.g., ample CPU, disk, and RAM).

...

If a consolidated manual set were offered for sale there would be a lot of customers. Or an abridged version, something like the 1999 Excursion manual but expanded and updated, would be a possibility.

Any printed manual will soon become stale. What is needed is an introductory manual for new users together with an ongoing process to provide current information. The wiki is a good start, but there needs to be more effort to ensure that the sources can be used as the definitive manual. The introductory manual should devote considerable space to explaining how to find current information in the wiki and or using the source files.

My preferences in order are printed book, downloadable source, downloadable pdf and online anything. Information needs to be structured, indexed, portable, easily readable. -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com

I figured I would try adjusting the subject to make the query a little more apparent. Would it be possible to purchase some of the books on ConTeXt via Lulu? Geoffrey Alan Washburn wrote:

John R. Culleton wrote:

...

My preferences in order are printed book, downloadable source, downloadable pdf and online anything. Information needs to be structured, indexed, portable, easily readable.

Speaking of printed manuals, it struck me the other day that an interim solution would be to use Lulu (www.lulu.com) to obtain printed copies of the existing manuals. However, it would probably be best if the folks at PRAGMA ADE were to handle this to avoid some of the copyright issues, and they might as well be the ones receiving any profits from the sales.

Matthias Weber wrote:

Not unless the copyright holders submit the material to Lulu.

That wasn't my question.

In short, Lulu.com is a print-on-demand publisher with no costs involved for the author: He or she uploads a 'book', specifies bindings and his/her royalties, and if someone purchases the book, it is printed and send to the person. A percentage o the royalties goes to Lulu. In particular, one can choose to publish a book w/o royalties, then it will only cost the printing expenses. Downloads just cost the royalties, if permitted. Finally, the author can choose among a range of copyright options.

That would be why I said "However, it would probably be best if the folks at PRAGMA ADE were to handle this to avoid some of the copyright issues, and they might as well be the ones receiving any profits from the sales."

On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Hans Hagen wrote:

gnwiii@gmail.com wrote:

...

I don't agree that lack of a current manual is a big problem for potential users of ConteXt. In my experience, the biggest problem is with the 3rd party tools (perl, ghostscript, ruby) on Win32 and legacy commercial unix (where ruby is not provided and the system perl will be a very old version).

actually, one could run context using "pdftex --fmt ...... " but it's less convenient;

technically i could generate most of the tuo file directly (although index sorting always has to rely on an external prog)

some two pass data (cross ref etc) can be loaded before an aux file is written, but toc info cannot, and tex itself cannot rename a temp file afterwards; because context can create tocs at any level any time, this means that there will always be a need for an separate read and write file (actuallym this is also true for more two pass data since some data structures may be defined anywhere in teh document which also leads to async loading)

in luatex, i will probably write the index sorter in lua as well as support a different two pass info model as well which means that in principle one could provide an embedded kind of texexec funtionality; of course multiple runs still have to be managed by some external script then but this can be simple since tex itself can signal the need for that

Does this mean that in future (distant future) it will be possible to simple pass cont-en.fmt file along with the source file and write %&cont-en in the tex file, and someone just having plain tex can run tex filename (possibly multiple times) to get the output? If so, it may make things like submissions to some journals and online archives like arxiv very easy. Aditya