Hello,
On Sun, 10 Jun 2007 17:31:45 -0500, Pepe Barbe
I have used ConTeXt in the past and I have been very pleased with it and the results obtained, much more than LaTeX.
Now I am looking into a solution that would allow me to layout the content ConTeXt and in other formats that ConTeXt does not (Forgive my ignorance, if I am wrong) output, like HTML, Plain Text, or RTF (Those are the formats that I can think of that are interesting to me currently).
Reading the Wiki one of those solutions would be XML, but I know very little about the subject, so this email is to ask about experiences in similar endeavors, other solutions for the same problem and how practical this is.
I suppose that I would use this for general writing and for academic as well (Maths and engineering).
XML is a good format if you need several output formats without losing information (XHTML, HTML, PDF, manpages, plain text). But I recommend some well established grammar (DITA, DocBook) to be able to use their official transformation tools, and to be able to use some XML WYSIWYG editor that supports them natively (like XXE). Strangely enough the PDF output is weakest point since most of the tools use FO and the related compilers (well known FOP, maybe xmlroff, maybe fotex) which can give very ugly output. The only good compiler I know is XEP, but it is not free (there's a full featured personnal edition that sticks its logo on every page). For docbook, you can try marginal tools to convert the XML to *tex formats (DocbookInContext, db2latex, dblatex). You can also directly use the native XML handling of context (method used by DocbookInContext) but IMHO it needs some context knowledge. Personnaly I use docbook, mostly because I have to produce PDF, HTML, and troff (manpages) outputs. It is even possible to convert some already existing manpages to docbook with doclifter. Regards, BG