On 12/24/07, Aditya Mahajan
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.
This is consistent with my experience.
I suggest that anyone considering such conversions creating a simple test
document with one example of each construct you use. I took Lamport's
sample2e.tex, added a figure and a table, and then made a context version
which is part of my test suite for new tex installations.
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George N. White III