[XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 01:57:14PM -0500, Herbert Schulz wrote:
> 
> On Sep 14, 2010, at 1:16 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:24:05AM -0700, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote:
> >> A somewhat belated reply.....
> >> 
> >>> - Of course ConTeXt mustn't be ignored. ConTeXt Mk IV,
> >>> which is based on LuaTeX, seems to have everything that is
> >>> missing from LaTeX: a stable, coherent interface, a
> >>> well-designed architecture that makes LaTeX-style hacking
> >>> and package clashes unnecessary, XML support,
> >>> micro-typography, OpenType math, and much more. In most
> >>> respects it's several decades ahead of LaTeX. I've noticed
> >>> that newbies have been mentioned several times in this
> >>> thread: perhaps beginners should ignore LaTeX altogether and
> >>> use ConTeXt exclusively.
> >> 
> >> The problem with ConTeXt (in my opinion, at least) is comes with virtually no pre-coded layout class or style files. On Context-garden I read something along the lines of "We expect that the user knows what (s)he is doing so we don't tell the user how to lay out a document." or something along those lines. That is a great big barrier.
> > 
> > If you ever struggled coercing LaTeX to lay out your document the way
> > you want it, you will really appreciate this ConTeXt feature.
> > 
> 
> Howdy,
> 
> Actually there are some very good document classes and packages for LaTeX that allow nice document design.
> 
> Beyond that one really needs some very nice examples (nicely commented would be especially useful) of well designed document design so that one can actually learn instead of just get overwhelmed by the complexity (at least in the eyes of a LaTeX user) of setting up anything in ConTeXt. I'm particularly confused in trying to use my Lucida Bright fonts with MkIV (I finally got it to work in MkII, maybe). Sorry, the garden is very nice looking but seems way out of date.

If I wanted to learn document design, I'd go to a design school, anyway,
I usually have a designer giving me a specific layout and asking me to
implement, so any predefined, near impossible to change layout is not
even am option.

But there are good and documented examples on the wiki (it might not be
very up to date as regard of MkIV, but a XeTeX user does not use MkIV
anyway).

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer