Alexandra Ribeiro wrote:
At this moment I’ve to make a choice: continue using Word or start learning a new tool, which will probably consume much of my time. So, I’m in a dilemma. That’s why I’m asking for help.
Off the top of my head, I'd say you have to ask yourself at least the following questions: - How much time are you willing to spend on a tool? - How much do you *really* bother about the final appearance? - What formats is your PhD advisor happy with? - Assuming you would like to reuse some parts of your thesis for independent publications, what formats do the journals in your field accept? - How much help do you need when learning? How much of this can come from a mailing list (and its archives), how much must be presented in book format and how much face-to-face introduction do you need? What do people around you know and use?
Is it really worth learning Context? I mean, does this package deal
It depends. For me, definitely, but I've long reached the area in LaTeX where doing what I want to do means hacking around the design limitations of that system – and that probably implies that I'll have a hard time being satisfied by InDesign, OOo or whatever program limited by the WYSIWYG approach.
efficiently with some important things like TOC, cross-references, bibliography, figures, math, …?
Certainly. (You did not mention footnotes and multiple indices, but I regard those as crucial in any typesetting tool, too.)
Is it too hard to learn (for a mere mortal, of course)?
It depends. The worst thing about ConTeXt is its almost complete lack of error diagnostics. Forget a curly brace somewhere or mistype the name of an option and you'll probably spend hours looking for it, the first couple of times. It certainly helps to have some programming experience.
What about support for different languages, in particular for Portuguese?
I don't know any Portuguese, but multiple languages are supported.
If I choose Context, can some somebody give me some guidelines/advices?
Do read the manual. Print it and have it next to your computer. Make notes in there. After reading the manual, go to contextgarden.net and click on “Random Page” a couple of times. Do this every morning – you will find a lot of things which are completely irrelevant to you (and solve problems of others, which is why they are there), but the occasional gem is worth the time. Christopher