Re: [NTG-context] future versions

On 7/25/2018 3:12 PM, Weber, Matthias wrote:

I have an entirely different suggestion, possibly fitting the description of a possible “lean” version.

One important feature of TeX has been the longevity of the documents. This is of course of little interest to those of us who typeset a book/journal for publishing and care little about it when it’s done. But there is an interest in keeping the documents available in the long term, meaning decades and possibly centuries (making assumptions about the human race here). TeX has survived the transition from dvi/ps to pdf, and it is probably fair to assume that pdf won’t be around forever. But it is probably also fair to assume that there will be straightforward ways to generate from TeX sources documents in a future PDF replacement.

so far no replacemtn showed up (ok, html is an alternatiev but that's a different thing) .. even pdf 2.0 (which we support) isn't revolutionary different from 1.7

This is in particular of concern in the scientific community where mathematical/physical/chemical formulas and diagrams are very hard to parse semantically (which, admittedly, might change in the future, too). For instance, the preprint server at arXiv.org has been storing scientific preprints since 1991, preferably in TeX or LaTeX. It would be an enormous benefit if the arXiv would accept a ConTeXt version. Scientific journals might then follow suit. At the moment I believe they use LaTeX from TeXLive 2016.

It is of course a question whether a potentially much larger user base is desirable, because it likely means more requests for support/documentation etc.

I don't think that a larger user base is a problem. It might actually trigger users into writing more manuals, wiki entries, tutorials. But 'marketing' in a world where tex is equivalent to latex is not trivial.

In any case, I would very much appreciate another “frozen” release like MK II that one can use for documents that need to be retypeset over years (like my lecture notes that need an update every few years).

When we have luatex 1.10 that will be easier because older code can run on a newer engine then. But even then, if we make snapshots that can be downloaded for a long time, we need some way to recognize them (by year?). Using snapshots in parallel is no big deal. One problem is that one also needs to save the fonts (it will probably take a few years before the lm/gyre collection is long term stable).

Matthias

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On Jul 25, 2018, at 8:50 AM, Hans Hagen wrote:

On 7/25/2018 12:03 PM, Richard Mahoney | Indica et Buddhica wrote:

...

Agree wholeheartedly, and possibly also support for Tibetan. define support ... what is needed

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