On 8/16/06, Jeff Smith wrote:
Hi!
I'm fairly new to ConTeXt (which I greatly admire, by the way) and after reading a couple of provided manuals, I have some lingering questions. I thank anyone in advance for replying to any number of them.
The fonts manual mentions how TeX is often qualified as 'the font mess'. Well, yeah, my head hurts right now... :-( Here are some font-related issues that are very important to me:
Some of the font mess might disappear when the new pdfTeX comes out (next year). If you're a font fan and if you're in a hurry, you might try XeTeX (it supports Unicode & OpenType fonts, which are much easier to use than if you want to install your own font into TeX tree and use it with standard pdfTeX), but when I last tried it, it didn't support inclusion of external figures on Windows. (I don't know if Hans has included it into the standalone Windows version already.)
a) Somehow I can't come up with small caps in a Times font. Is this normal? This happens either by using \sc or \setupcapitals[sc=yes] along with \cap.
Left for someone else to answer.
b) LaTeX has a package for the International Phonetic Alphabet called tipa. Is it possible to use it in ConTeXt? If not, can anybody point me to the relevant manuals that will help me incorporate official IPA fonts (say, the TTF version) in my ConTeXt installation? I'm using the stand-alone Windows distribution, btw.
It's not there yet, but as far as I can remember someone (probably Taco?, I might be wrong) was willing to help incorporating it if one of the users would describe what exactly is neeeded and help testing it. (with XeTeX and a proper OpenType font you would probably get them out-of-the-box)
Two language related issues:
c) There was a French language specific package in LaTeX that made possible the direct use of accented characters in the source text (like é, à, ô) without using the explicit commands themselves. Can this be achieved in ConTeXt (because right now their direct use simply halts the compiling)? I would believe so, since the manual for French documents by Peter Münster shows how to set up automatic spacing before the strong punctuation marks (! ? ; :) without explicit commands every time. I'm guessing the strategy would be the same with accented characters, but so far I haven't been able to make it work.
d) Is it possible to build some sort of macro that would automatically make \quotation marks different when inside another \quotation command? Basically, we use « » (the French guillemets) as standard quotation marks, but we use single quotes instead inside another quotation. At this point, I'd only need a yes or no answer. It would ease my mind to know there can be a way to streamline this usage of quotation marks, thereby simplifying greatly the input text.
The answer to both questions: \enableregime[utf-8] % or latin9/iso-8859-15 or cp1252 \mainlanguage[fr] See lang-ita.tex. I didn't understand which quotes exactly you want to have, but if you want the english ones for some reason: \setuplanguage[fr] [leftquote=\upperleftsinglesixquote, rightquote=\upperrightsingleninequote] Mojca