Hi John, John R. Culleton wrote:
I use Context for highly formatted non-fiction, but I am a bit reluctant to use it for much of my work because of the strange (to me) font handling arrangements. I see no purpose for the multiple synonyms of the same font. That just adds layers of extra work.
It also adds layers of configurability. Clearly you do not need that (your font setups is extremely simple and low-level), but lots of other people do. For example, I have documents that use 6 totally different font sets, because all 'examples' and 'definitions' are typeset in font families that differ from the normal text font family. It would be a nightmare if I had to define and remember the 200+ font definitions by hand.
If the page comes up a line short because of strict widow prevention then the extra space is distributed imperceptibly among the lines.
It is only imperceptible if the paper you print on does not shine through at all, and if you use a noteblock (head) binding instead of book (back) binding, so it is not something I would recommend for general use.
This kind of fine tuning by users is perhaps foreign to Context as it now exists. Font sizes are in fixed steps for one thing.
The fixed steps (of .1pt) are actually an optimization, and it is possible to circumvent that, using either \chardef\fontdigits=2 or \def\normalizebodyfontsize#1\to#2{\setvalue{#2}{#1}}
So here is my question. If I set up my own font definition system and as part of it I have statements like: \font\tfa bchr8r at 10.45pt \font\tfb bchr8r at 11.37pt ... ... will the rest of Context accept the above tfb font and size in places where a heading macro automatically defaults to tfb?
Only if you never make any \{setup,switchto}bodyfont switches after your new font definitions. Cheers, Taco