On Thu, 24 Oct 2013, Lars Huttar wrote:
Hello, I was looking into simplefonts (http://wiki.contextgarden.net/simplefonts) and noticed the clause
if you’re running ConTeXt Standalone http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone (which is a better option)
Well I'm using TeXLive, but am happy to take good advice, so I looked at http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone to see why it would be a better option. The basic reason I can see is that Standalone is updated more frequently.
Three or four years ago, when ConTeXt was moving from MkII to MkIV, you had to run through hoops to get context working with TL. Since the last two years, ConTeXt works out of the box in TL.
So if you're using bleeding-edge features of ConTeXt (including recent fixes to simplefonts?), I can see wanting to use Standalone and have access to the latest features and fixes.
On the other hand, if you're working on a large production project that has to be careful of stability, is there any advantage to Standalone over TeXLive? Sure, you can keep a standalone version frozen in place, but then that seems equivalent to staying with an existing version of TeXLive.
No. In some sense, it is better to use the frozen version that is part of TL rather than an arbitrary beta version from standalone. Every once in a while, the beta version has bugs (those are usually fixed in a matter of hours). But it can be tricky to decide which version to freeze for a long term production environment. On the other hand, the version of ConTeXt that ships with TL is tested more thoroughly. So, there is some guarantee that it will not include any serious bugs. Aditya