On Sun, 7 May 2017 23:33:30 +0200
r.ermers@hccnet.nl wrote:

I recently finished a book project in multimarkdown, which I
converted to LaTeX (I could not use ConTeXt because of its limited
bibliographical functions in comparison to BibLatex).

Just wonder, since I plan to embrace ConTeXt for a larger educational-based
project with the need to use bibliographical functions, what did you prevent
you to use it?

Let me say that I'm fully familiar with neither BibLatex's capabilities nor
with the similar things in MkIV... 

Sincerely,
Gour

The utility of the new bibliography subsystem is a function of your ability to work within the rigid structure of the APA reference standards. Even with that, there are outstanding bugs that have not been addressed for many months.

If your publisher requires adherence to some other bibliographical standards, or even variations of the APA standards, the new subsystem may not suffice, or may not suffice without significant customization that requires understanding of the source code.

(ConTeXt also has some support for the APS standard, but that is secondary to APA in the implementation plan as so far revealed. There is no current plan of which I am aware to support more humanities-focused standards (Chicago, MHRA, Turabian, ...), although I would be happy to be proved wrong on that.)

For comparison, BibLaTeX supports tens of different standards and variants, and has (or had a couple of years ago when I last used it) an active community of developers. To accomplish this, BibLaTeX relies on many added tags to BibTeX, thus forgoing compatibility with other systems.

The differences between the two derive from a few basic decisions taken by the ConTeXt developers. Among these, ConTeXt prefers to not add additional fields to BibTeX, and prefers to develop its own code without reliance on third-party software.

If your document requires bibliographic support beyond what ConTeXt currently provides, there is another mechanism by which you can incorporate other reference standards. You can write your document in Pandoc [1] Markdown and use any of the hundreds of reference standards and variants supported there through CSL [2]. Pandoc can create an XML result that can be transformed into a PDF by ConTeXt with the bibliography created according the the selected CSL format. This works well for documents that do not require significant customization, but may become cumbersome when you must fiddle with many individual objects. I have done this for a book-scale project as a proof of concept, and the bibliography handling works well. My work expands on that of Pablo Rodríguez, who addressed the method in a note to you last year [3].

[1] http://pandoc.org/
[2] http://citationstyles.org/
[3] https://www.mail-archive.com/ntg-context@ntg.nl/msg83581.html

--
Rik