Bug#144647: [#144647] ConTeXt documentation is sparse
Hello,
Frank Küster wrote:
| While looking at old Bug reports in the Debian BTS, I found that the
| context documentation is a little sparse. I do not use it at all,
| therefore I don't know which of the documents on the website are useful
| (and don't know anything about the licenses). But what is odd is that of
| the executables that are symlinks to texexec (fdf2tan makempy texfind
| texfont texshow texutil), only texutil and texshow have a manpage, and
| the others are not even mentionened in mtexexec.pdf or ms-cb-en.pdf.
A) LICENSE
Regarding the License, read texmf/doc/context/base/mreadme.pdf.
"ConTEXt is available as free software in the spirit of the gnu general
public licence."
Manuals: "Because the manuals provided by Pragma ADE are also examples
of what can be done with ConTEXt, their layout is bound to these
documents. This also applies to the ConTEXt demonstration suite.
Therefore, in order to avoid confusion, we strongly advice authors of
third party documentation and demos not to use the same layout
characteristics, graphics and special tricks."
And "We hereby grant permission to the de facto offcial TEX distributors
teTEX, fpTEX and TEXlive to replace this licence with their own, i.e.
their licence may supersede or enhance this one."
Where te (Thomas Esser) placed a file into that directory stating "If
ConTeXt is not free software by the license in mreadme.pdf, the
following terms replace the licence for ConTeXt given in mreadme.pdf:
[GPL 2 or higher]"
Therefore, I think one can consider ConTeXt including the documentation
as free (in terms of Debian).
(For details, please contact the copyright holder, viz. Hans Hagen,
pragma@wxs.nl.)
B) REGARDING SCRIPTS
The reason that several files symlink to texexec is the following:
ConTeXt comes with several scripts which are (in cont-tmf.zip) all in
$TEXMF/context/perltk. All those 9 files are not executable when
unzipped. In order to make sure that they are always executable and that
local copies (e.g. $HOME/texmf) are used, Thomas wrote a script which
basically does: exec $(kpsewhich `basename $0`.pl). And he has chosen
the name of one of the scripts, namely texexec.
Regarding the scripts themselves: texutil.pl, texexec.pl and texshow.pl
are documented in the manpage written by Connelly and me (which is based
on the PDF documentation of Hans Hagen). The other scripts were not
present at the time when the manual pages were written.
texfont: Font installation util,
http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/mtexfont.pdf
texfind: A kind of grep with graphical output
fdf2tan: Convert PDF formular data (FDF) into something (Con)TeX(t) can
handle
fdf2tex: Dito. For both: Ask Hans for the details
mptopdf: Convert a MetaPost file into a PDF (mpost file.mp creates a
Postscript file which doesn't contain the fonts, therefore one has to
run it through tex+dvips/pdftex using a tex file wrapper)
makempy: Currently, I frankly don't remember the purpose of this script
C) REGARDING FURTHER DOCUMENTATION
For MetaPost graphics, the metafun manual
(http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/metafun-s.pdf) is rather nice,
"It's in the details", i.e.
http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/details.pdf is also sometimes
helpful.
But the biggest omission is probably the ConTeXt manual which is
incomplete, but nethertheless indispensible:
http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/cont-eni.pdf
Regards,
Tobias
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