On Sat, 22 Dec 2007, Gour wrote:
5) I read LaTeX in proper ConTeXt pdf, but I'm interested is there some helper to convert classical LaTeX book (book class) to ConTeXt? I've two books which I'm considering to publish as one (~1000p) in the future, so any help in conversion would be nice.
I do this quite often (ConTeXt -> LaTeX), so I am just writing my thoughts about this. A general purpose translator from ConTeXt to LaTeX is VERY difficult, because of the nature of both macro languages. However, it is relatively simple to convert a subset of one to the other. Currently, I write most of my papers in ConTeXt. For the final version of the paper, most journals want LaTeX. I know my style of writing ConTeXt, and can easily convert 95% percent of it to LaTeX using regular expressions (and have been thinking of exploring gema in more detail: http://gema.sourceforge.net/). It is easier to do the rest by hand rather than writing a script that takes care of all the corner cases. Usually it takes me around 2 hours to convert a (30-40 page) paper from ConTeXt to LaTeX. Since this needs to be done only once every six months or so, I have not spent too much time trying to optimize my approach. I think that the same will be true for conversion from LaTeX to ConTeXt. However, I would suggest that you start by writing some ConTeXt documents by hand, before you automate the conversion. This way, you will know what you want to achieve from a conversion script. Another option is to write a ConTeXt module that will allow you to understand LaTeX. For most environments, this is simple. There are a few examples on the wiki about this.
6) the most important issue - by looking at luaTeX docs & archives I noticed that it was mentioned there is some book on ConTeXt in preparation - I gave up on ConTeXt in the past due to this reason - lack of up-to-date documentation - didn't have enough time to try to sovle the puzzle by inspecting different 'magazines' etc. cause I was able to do the kob with LaTeX for which I've documentation in the form of paper books.
Actually, from a user's point of view, most things are included in the ConTeXt manuals. They are not exhaustive or up-to-date, but do convey the essential information. For most tasks you do not need to know the current state of affairs in ConTeXt. Aditya