Patrick Gundlach wrote:
[...]
We are in a fully programmable environment, and it is extremely unConTeXtish to hack the visual appearance.
I am an XML author, so am pretty amazed to hear that one should not mix appearance and content in ConTeXt. Most of a ConTeXt document involves visual appearance. What is one saying when one writes \blank[12pt]?
This is visual appearance, of cource. But I am not talking about one single instance of \blank anywhere, I am talking about changing a reaeated statement (like the footnotes) by visual means. And formatting instructions have no right to exist there (in fact they should be filtered out by \sanitizelogigalmarkup{\footnote...}. This is one of the great advantages of using a high level language such as LaTeX or ConTeXt (and ConTeXt so much more than LaTeX) that we can define layout in this way.
to this i can add that concerning the blank, one preferably should follow the indirect approach, thereby avoiding hard coded numbers in the document source \defineblank[mybig][33pt] .... \blank[mybig] Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------