[XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/10/2010 9:18 AM, Tobias Schoel wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> some remarks from a happily xelatex-using maths and physics teacher 
> who has just finished university:
>
> When someone arrives at xelatex he has usually gone some way through 
> the tex/latex world already. (Mostly latex, I think.) You can safely 
> suppose that he has read and used:
>  - lshort
>  - one latex book (companion, texbook, ...)
>  - some further tutorials and package documentations he needed

Assumptions are bad science =)

I can't say I ever actually read lshort, for instance, and I personally 
jumped straight into xelatex because the internet told me it was the 
only unicode-aware flavour of TeX, making the choice ridiculously easy. 
The only thing I used at the time to "get up to speed" as it were was 
the wikibook on latex. and that stopped being useful relatively quickly 
when I discovered big or long tables in latex were ridiculous to typeset 
nicely.

If we end up writing good enough documentation, someone doesn't have to 
arrive to xelatex "from" another flavour - they'll have been told to use 
xelatex by their friends and colleagues already, so writing it now with 
an eye to the future would be good policy.

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans