Re: [NTG-context] future versions

I am using XML a lot for structured data and typesetting them with hopefully not too much attention to detail — although I must confess often being a hopeless perfectionist. If there are general improvements that can be made in that direction, I would welcome them. Although I apologise not being able to propose concrete suggestions at the moment, I hope this post will incite those more knowledgeable than me, to do so. They are thanked beforehand. Hans van der Meer

On 24 Jul 2018, at 20:43, Hans Hagen wrote:

Hi,

Around the upcoming context meeting we expect to release luatex 1.09 (or 1.10 ... yet undecided) which is the prelude to the next year tex live version. It's another step towards a stable version in terms of functionality as we don't expect much more to be added (in fact, I'm wondering if it makes sense to come up with a leaner and meaner version at some point because context can probably benefit from that). Of course under the hood there are improvements possible and we have some ideas (that might materialize at some point) but generally spoken, this is what one gets.

That said, a logical question is how about next versions of context. Are there fundamental features missing? Is more needed? Keep in mind that we're not talking of desk top publishing (click and point and place stuff) and also not of word processing (office like stuff) but of mostly automated structured document rendering. Also, keep in mind the landscape that we operate in (context development is mostly user driven as publishers imo long ago lost interest in any research and development and the potential of tex and friends is largely unknown elsewhere).

It's not my intention to implement each possible feature as core feature (no one would document it anyway). Also, as development is basically a spare time effort, don't expect complex commercially interesting niches to come for free either as in that case one can wait till I a find a reason for implementing it for fun or development is driven by a project.

When thinking of future additions, tex, lua, metapost of a mix is possible. They should be of interest for more than one user. Of course it can also be that everything needed is there. Maybe existing mechanisms can be improved in terms of functionality or performance (although i think that performance wise we're ok). But again keep in mind that the boundary conditions (all these interacting sub mechanisms) also prohibit some functionality.

Hans

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