Hi Philip,
But it couldn't, because when LaTeX first became mainstream (LaTeX 2.09), there was no such series of books, there was (just) Leslie Lamport's /LATEX: a Document Preparation System : User's Guide and Reference Manual/, which even today sells for GBP 20-00 on Amazon. So someone had to write "The Companions", and if you consider the effort involved in doing that, as well as the effort involved in developing LaTeX2e from LaTeX 2.09, I think you will agree that the investment in time must have been very considerable. So it seems to me that it is not unreasonable for those who wrote the Companions to seek to recoup some of the writing and development costs by charging a reasonable sum for copies. Does that seem unreasonable to you ?
For back when LaTeX was new and relatively unknown, and information about it sparse? no, that approach was perfectly reasonable. However, that was also almost twenty years ago. When I started using LaTeX, maybe four or five years ago, I did so because it was mainstream, being the defacto formatting language for scientific publications, for instance. So, back then, perfectly reasonable. If the exercise were repeated today, with so much information and so much (and so easily achieved) international cooperation? I'd say unacceptably unreasonable =)
But let's leave this particular discussion for what it is (or let's take it off-list, at least) so that the thread can focus on discussing a concerted documentation effort of Xe(La)TeX without sidetracking.
- Mike -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
