On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 01:41:32PM -0700, Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
This page is my best effort at describing how someone who is used to FO would do the same thing in ConTeXt. The page is just one of many I hope to write on FO and ConTeXt.
Excuse my ignorance, but what is FO?
Sorry for not explaining that. Once I get an introductory page set up, I can explain. FO is short for Formatting Object. It serves the same purpose as ConTeXt, except in XML. You markup the document in FO, then run it through a processor, and the output is PDF. Normally, one does not actually write the document directly in FO. Usually one has the document already written in another type of XML, like docbook or TEI. Then one converts the document to FO. FO had great promise in that it was a a standard developed by the same consortium that developed the new standards for HTML. However, the actual open source software to convert FO to PDF is seriously lacking in comparison to LaTeX or ConTeXt. For example, the open source application FOP, written in java, does not let you move tables around on a page. The version of FOP is .2, and if you consider that a mature piece of software has a number of 1.0, you can see how far FOP has to come. One need not know FOP to actually follow my tutorial. Anyone who has to convert from XML, and knows XSLT, will hopefully find some of the tips useful. What I am trying to do is strip down ConTeXt to the bare minimum needed, because with an XSLT conversion, you need less of ConTeXt's features, such as list numbering. Paul -- ************************ *Paul Tremblay * *phthenry@iglou.com * ************************