On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Piotr wrote:
For now I had quite some difficulties to find that proper Latex distribution
You only have MikTeX and TeX Live. (I used to be a big MikTeX fan. Not much difference, but MikTeX is more "user friendly" for my biased taste; sadly lacking ConTeXt at the moment.)
- a problem that actually led me to the existence of ConTeXt. I am wondering which latex distribution I should choose in order to work with ConTeXt?
I like the wording a lot (which *LaTeX* distribution to choose) :) :) :) There are three options: a) TeX Live b) MikTeX, but you need quite some manual tweaking and non-trivial settings to make ConTeXt run c) ConTeXt minimals (you can have them installed in addition to the other distribution), no LaTeX, but (almost) no GUI, frequent updates
Is there any point to have latex installed, when context can do the trick?
If you plan to use ConTeXt exclusively, you don't need to have LaTeX installed unless you compile other people's documents.
Or lets ask the devils advocate the other way around: What is the point of installing context, when latex could do the trick?
If LaTeX can do what you need, none ;) And I seriously mean it.
Apart that I have to re-learn latex anyway.. what is better with Context?
(others have answered rather well)
There was a mention of Latex beeing designed for mathematic purposes, while ConTeXt was said to be better suited for the intergration of graphics or larger/more complex layout changes.
Speaking with a bit of irony & highly biased: In LaTeX you accept the fact that you cannot do any complex layout modifications. Consequently you don't even try to adapt anything, so you can devote more time to contents and don't need to fight with bugs (unless you start including > 5 packages :) In ConTeXt it's easy to be more creative with layouts, easy to reach the limits of what's possible, but also possible to ask for adding some missing functionality and some bugs\footnote{also possible to ask to remove them of course} :) :) :) If you need some creative distraction while writing your thesis, you have just arrived to the perfect place :) Mojca