Hi Philip,
I think you will find that the charge for the Companions (rather like the charge for the TeXbook itself) goes to offset the expenses of those developing LaTeX (resp. TeX) rather than lining anyone' pocket ...
I never claimed it lined anyone's pockets, or that charging money for it is terrible, but it's an authorative work that should have existed as "official" documentation for LaTeX in the first place, like any good product comes with a good manual. Just having a noble cause for the proceeds is not, on its own, enough to sell something. The typical person will justify paying for a book based on how useful the book is, and that's the tricky part: if you've never touched TeX before, there is no way for you to appreciate how hard the work was that others put in developing and doucmenting it. It's just another technology. You just see a loose collection of packages and an engine that people claim are free and fantastic, and "not as hard as people make it sound", but then you discover that as you're trying to use it, it actually IS that hard, and you need a $50 book just to explain what a normal person expects is already explained in the help files. Which don't exist =)
Of course, you can spend days trawling the internet for free snippets that explain the specific problem you're having, and you can post on a newsgroup or a mailing list and get help that way, but that shouldn't have to be a first recourse, but more of a fallback approach when the documentation doesn't cover what you want to do. And, when you're new to LaTeX, anything you're trying to do should be in the documentation, because you're not likely to do something a large number of people didn't try to do before you.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the "free digital form and for-monies book form" idea that Bruce Eckel more popular -- I stick to that model myself for my own book, too -- where, if the material is useful, people buy the book anyway because it's a good book to have. Of course if others don't subscribe to that philosophy, no problem. But free digital documentation makes everyone's lives easier I think =)
- Mike -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
