On Nov 8, 2006, at 8:35 PM, Pablo Rodríguez wrote:
Many thanks, Thomas, for your reply.
Maybe the issue here is that I want to learn how to do things in ConTeXt that I was able to do with LaTeX. But this may be the wrong approach to ConTeXt (because this might not be a good way to learn ConTeXt using LaTeX as the background example).
No, I think this approach is what many users do. As long as you don't insist that you want exactly the same syntax etc, as in LaTeX :-)
I want ConTeXt to produce mainly articles and textbooks (after learning that it will be easy to figure out presentations). I know some references, but I don't know which are the best ones.
BTW, are “ConTeXt, an excursion” and “ConTeXt the manual” good introductions to start with ConTeXt or are they (too) outdated?
Most of the basic stuff is still correct, so they should be good starters.
But to give you a few pointers that may or may not be useful:
Thanks, they are useful.
- The first stop would be the wiki http://wiki.contextgarden.net . There is a section called "Sample documents" that may be a good starting point.
- You could have a look at recent issues of the PracTeX journal; there is some stuff about ConTeXt in there, and it should be good for beginners.
- Of course, the Pragma website, but I guess you know that already.
- Finally, for ancient Greek, there is the ancientgreek module http:// modules.contextgarden.net/t-greek which I find superior to all Greek typesetting in LaTeX (because I wrote the module).
With this particular topic, I'm not sure whether I fully understand what you mean. For me, input and output must be Unicode (it is the best way to avoid problems) and this can be done with XeTeX. I don't know how good the integration with ConTeXt is, but for me and before LuaTeX is released in an stable version, XeTeX is the only way of dealing with fonts in TeX. Is there something in your Greek module that cannot be done with XeTeX?
I must admit that I've been too lazy to really test XeTeX, so I may be wrong here. You can use Unicode input with the module; the only difference would be that you have to wrap all Greek passages in \localgreek{} commands or \start ... \stop pairs. I guess XeTeX provides proper hyphenation for Greek, but - the module has support for more fonts than XeTeX; - does XeTeX allow relative scaling of fonts? Anyway, only Hans and Taco know to what extent I will have to rewrite everything when luatex and support for OpenType fonts are there.
Don't hesitate to ask here when you have specific questions, but maybe that can get you started. I am a humanities guy and do all my work in ConTeXt...
Actually, I knew that you were the person I wanted to ask about this. Some time ago, I read somewhere (on the web) that you switched to ConTeXt, after having to edit a book with Word. And then I discovered that you teach Classics at Bonn.
Then, if the question is not too personal (it hope not, but sorry if it is): how did you learn ConTeXt? Only tinkering with already existing modules? Did you read any manuals? (Again, if this is not too personal, I assume that our interests in ConTeXt are similar, although I'm not a classicist and I don't belong to the academia)
Thanks for your help,
Pablo
Yes, I started with already existing modules, and it took me a while (and lots of help here on the list) to write my own code. I never actually read any manual cover to cover, but the big manual is almost always open on my computer for reference. I just finished typesetting a book with ConTeXt, complete with dozens of cross-references, indexes, bibliography. Nothing very complicated, but it's wonderful to see that things work. There are still two or three problems, but they are fairly harmless. I love donig my own presentation styles with ConTeXt and metafun. The more I use ConTeXt, the more amazed I am... Hope this can inspire you a bit Thomas