Comments on: TextMate manual

By: kellan

kellan — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:49:10 +0000

Haven't had a chance to read the manual yet, but assuming its anywhere near as good as TM itself, I'd pay good money for a dead tree version.

By: Allan Odgaard

Allan Odgaard — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:32:46 +0000

William: PDF's are awfull for reading on-screen, which most will do with the manual. They also do not support deep-linking, can't be used as the help book distributed with TextMate, and there are the problems mentioned with UniCode glyphs, which is a requirement for such manual.

Adding to that, I don't think the difference between writing in Markdown and LaTeX is neglibable (and I have written longer texts using both systems).

So as much as I love LaTeX, it's certainly a very bad choice for writing the TextMate manual — as mentioned though, it's likely that there will be a PDF produced by converting the HTML to LaTeX (and using XeTeX for the Mac glyphs).

As you should know, HTML is just markup, not presentation, so by writing the manual in Markdown/HTML, I do not limit myself to a given link color, margin size, or similar.

Tilman: Try in TextMate to press ⌘? and you'll get the offline version.

By: Tilman

Tilman — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 07:49:07 +0000

I see that having the manual online and updated frequently is a great way to go. But in some situation I really would like to have this beauty on my harddrive for offline reading. Will this ever be downloadable in one piece? With table of contents, images, links and all? This would be my personal icing on the cake.

But still, this is what we were all waiting for. Thanks for doing the right thing. Merry Christmas, everybody, btw.

By: William D. Neumann

William D. Neumann — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 21:35:35 +0000

tom wrote: um… yes? And doesn’t “bit of ease” discount it too much?

Not at all. The difference in difficulty between creating a document with something like markdown and something like *tex is negligible. And when constructing a complex document, markdown-style tools are harder to use.

What's more, tools like markdown which are based on an internet publishing model have limited use outside the internet (which is, in turn, limited by the need to have a computing device online and in front of you). *tex, which leverages all those years of knowledge about typesetting, can be used to create documents that are not only of publishing quality, but are easily distributable on the internet as pdfs, so there's little win there in the ease of distribution area (really limited to areas like display on handheld devices).

By: Steven Hepting

Steven Hepting — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 05:44:40 +0000

First off, I'd like to say I had to stop for a moment out of sheer joy when just now I opened up the two LaTeX templates. I hadn't even gotten to reading the manual yet.

I think in section 5.2.2 Latex it says that the "Typeset & View (PDF)" command is supposed to be ⌘R. However, I think it is ⌘B (unless it's been changed in one of the bleeding edge releases).

By: mardoen

mardoen — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 04:11:55 +0000

The manual is really good. I'm reading it now, and I already found some things I didn't know although I'm faily TM-fluent. And it's cleaner and more to the point than most manuals I've seen.

By: Gerry

Gerry — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 01:48:40 +0000

Thanks for the ongoing effort with this tool. It keeps getting better and better and the manual will be of great help to getting even more out of the tool.

By: Bob Monsour

Bob Monsour — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 00:51:07 +0000

I just updated the link on the front page of the wiki where it points to http://macromates.com:3000/read/book/1 with link text as "taking place here". It now points to the new manual.

By: Bob Monsour

Bob Monsour — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 00:20:32 +0000

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I had managed to figure out some of the various productivity-enhancing drugs that you have included in the product, but the manual has now revealed even more of them; hence my continued addiction to TextMate.

Keep up the passion! It too is addictive, or should I say, contagious.

By: tom

tom — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:07:23 +0000

William said: “Hundreds of years have been spent on figuring out what makes text pleasing to read and we’re willing to throw it all away for a bit of ease of publishing and distribution?”

um... yes? And doesn't "bit of ease" discount it too much?

Allan: Thanks for the effort! I, for one, am glad to see it even if it is less than perfect. As we all know, everything you put out gets better and better over time. Looking forward to the "cookbook".