-----Original Message----- From: ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl [mailto:ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl] On Behalf Of Henning Hraban Ramm Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2010 5:11 PM To: mailing list for ConTeXt users Subject: Re: [NTG-context] Best version of ConTeXt Am 2010-07-08 um 20:54 schrieb Tom:
I get very confused by all the different versions.
You asked for the "best version", so we supposed you'd know several.
For starters, what is Tex Live? Is it the full blown Context or is it something else? The TUG site has Tex Live 2009 which I assume is a stable version that is distributed on DVDs to TUG members. I get the impression that other Context "compilers" for lack of a better term exist and that Context Minimals is a stripped down version of a more powerful one. How far off track am I?
There are only 2 different versions of ConTeXt, called Mark II and Mark IV (MkII, MkIV). They are always distributed together and still share a lot of code. MkII is stable, MkIV is the development version with several enhanced features and a completely new font handling. There are 3 different engines for TeX that work with ConTeXt: pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. MkIV works only with LuaTeX, MkII with any. Font setups (typescripts) differ per engine. There are several distributions of TeX that contain ConTeXt, the most notable are TeX Live (jointly published by most TeX User Groups of the world) and MikTeX (Windows only). If you don't need LaTeX, we suggest our ConTeXt minimals distribution - at least for MkIV, because it's always the most up-to-date one. "Minimals" is in no way stripped down (even if it was meant to be a "bare bones" ConTeXt distro), but contains even several tools and free fonts. Most distributions contain all engines. MkII ist called by "texexec" (a Ruby script, i.e. you need Ruby installed), MkIV ist called by "context" (a Lua script, directly executed by LuaTeX). Greetlings from Lake Constance! Hraban --- http://www.fiee.net/texnique/ http://wiki.contextgarden.net https://www.cacert.org (I'm an assurer) Thank you for being so concise, Hraban. This helps a lot. Tom Benjey 717-258-9733 voice 717-243-0074 fax Twitter: @TomBenjey