Re: [Texmacs-dev] Free Software needs Free Documentation

[Giovanni Piredda]

Am 19.06.2021 um 19:00 schrieb martin-kemp@brusseler.com:
> The biggest deficiency in texmacs is not in the software - it is
> the lack of good free manuals.

I agree that a wider documentation would benefit TeXmacs. The manual at 
the moment is written in a synthetic way:

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/help/book.en.html

and

https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/manual/web-manual.en.html (by the way I do 
not find the link to it from the main TeXmacs page)

and can be overwhelming for new users.

The documentation that comes with the program as far as I saw (I checked 
only briefly) coincides with the web manual.

I would see a longer tutorial as a very good thing, especially helpful 
to bring users from the "beginner" to "intermediate" stage (e.g., being 
able to write to typeset parts of their documents).

At the moment I have contributed to the TeXmacs blog 
(https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/main.html), one thing that I 
cannot do is an article on macros for complex styling of an environment 
(e.g. environments that add items when one presses the Return key). 
Maybe someone else will write it. And maybe after that we will collect 
these explanations in a systematic tutorial manual.

This said, I would not chastise JvdH because he decided to publish the 
book with a publishing house on non-free terms: it is his own writing, 
he can do whatever he wants with it.