Paul Thompson wrote:
> There is really a somewhat deeper issue.  Like many who use LaTeX for more than 
> superficial stuff (I wrote a class file newlfm and several sty files, most of 
> which are not much used), I can read documentation and figger it out somewhat.  
> However, knowing of the EXISTENCE of a tool is really the key, not how it is 
> used.  How are people to learn that specific primitives exist?  It's not in the 
> LaTeX Companion, which is my starting point.

Well, primitives don't belong into a LaTeX documentation but rather into
machine documentation, and there it is at least mentioned. So to know
about deeper lying stuff, you often have to digg through the machine
documentation which mostly is not user-oriented, but more a technical
documentation.
It also helps to read some source code of fancy packages (like fontspec)
that make use of many nice primitives (or now, LaTeX3 commands).

cheers
Arno