[XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[George N. White III]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 6:25 AM, Michiel Kamermans
<pomax at nihongoresources.com> wrote:


> (And ideally keeping it free, even if it ends up available in book form. I
> personally found that the one truly annoying thing about the LaTeX companion
> - I don't mind paying for a reference work after it turns out it is the
> reference work I need, but what's the point of a free typesetting engine
> when the documentation costs a non-trivial amount of money? It always seemed
> to me the one real reason LaTeX is considered so inaccessible to the general
> public)

I don't mind paying for books I find useful, but I have found that The
LaTeX Companion
must be useful to people who do mind paying, as I have had to replace
it several times
after my copy went missing.   I don't have a lock on my office door,
so I've had other
books disappear once, but TLC is the only  one that needed replacement
multiple times.
I like Cory Doctorow's approach -- you can get his book for free and
if you want to pay
for it he suggests donating copies to schools and libraries.   Maybe
if more libraries had
TLC I could keep it on my shelf.

For works like TLC the ability to search for a specific topic gives
digital versions an
advantage over print.   I have noticed that many people need help locating the
appropriate section in TLC using contents and index, despite the
obvious effort that
went into those parts fo teh book.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia