On Sun, 10 Dec 2006, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
Taco Hoekwater wrote:
Hi,
I have good news as well as bad news.
The good news is that the coming TeXLive will be nicely up to date when it comes to ConTeXt (currently at 2006.12.07).
In fact, I believe we should consider retracting ConTeXt from TeXLive perminently (for TL2007, we have already made promises for TL2006).
[reasons snipped]
This is indeed a very sad affair of things. IMO, ConTeXt not being included in TL is fine, as long as there is alternative. Right now, installing ConTeXt on windows is not a problem. I have introduced some of my friends to ConTeXt, and I simply recommend downloading the stand-alone distribution from Pragma. Most people do have MikTeX, but MikTeX's support for ConTeXt is/was partially broken, and does not keep pace with ConTeXt's development.
From what I have heard/read, on OSX gwTeX has good support for ConTeXt and it is also the most popular OSX tex distribution.
This leaves *nix. Now that tetex is dead, most distributions are switching to TL. Is there an alternative way of using ConTeXt which will work out of the box---something equivalent to the stand-alone distribution for Windows. If there is, then we can just ask a *nix user to use that alternative. There have been efforts by debian maintainers to get proper support for ConTeXt, so I think that all Debian based flavours will have proper ConTeXt support. There was also a rpm package by Peter Munser (IIRC), but I think that it was based on TL. Is there an alternative to other flavours of *nix? The installation instructions on the wiki for linux are intimidating. I guess that is because of the general mess in tetex and texlive towards ConTeXt, but there has to a simpler alternative. Aditya