On Thu, 28 Dec 2006, Douglas Philips wrote:
Hello again,
I've just recently tried to "get up to speed" on ConTeXt by reading what I could find on the web, including cont-eni.pdf (ConTeXt the manual by Hans Hagen, November 12th, 2001).
That is the most up to date manual and should get you started for most of the basic features. The features that are not in the manual are mostly related to specific needs, so you can get around even if you do not know about them. Some My Ways discuss some of these undocumented features.
Recent activity on this list, discussing the Debian packaging, says (and I commented on this a few days ago in another thread): "ConTeXt is developed rapidly, often in response to requests from the friendly user community."
And so I am wondering if ConTeXt is still too fresh... and if I'll have any chance of figuring out what/how to use it without having been on this list for the past 4+ years...
Just give it a shot. The is "Latex in proper context" by Berend de Boer which can help in the transition. The general information on http://wiki.contextgarden.net/From_LaTeX_to_ConTeXt is also useful. Context is very stable, and much better documented than latex. You can start with small documents in context to get comfortable with it. The best documents to start are those where you do not have a strict formatting requirement, so that you do not need to worry if you can not get something working.
(IIRC, Hans is also a core team member of LuaTeX, so perhaps I should just suck it up with LaTeX until LuaTeX is viable?)
LuaTeX is not a replacement for LaTeX. It is a replacement for pdfTeX. For the normal user, LuaTeX is not going to make too much of a different. It will make things a lot easier if you want to write really complicated macros. With context, the user will not even notice the change, other than some improvement in speed, and some of the pending feature requests getting implemented. So, if you are planning on switching to context, there is no real need to wait for luatex. Read "Context an excursion" and "Latex in proper context" to get started, and keep scanning through "Context the manual". If you are stuck, search the wiki and the mailing list, and if you can not figure it out, ask on the list. HTH, Aditya