Sorry for not having answered before, Thomas.
- Finally, for ancient Greek, there is the ancientgreek module http:// modules.contextgarden.net/t-greek which I find superior to all Greek typesetting in LaTeX (because I wrote the module).
Is this module contained in the standard ConTeXt distribution or has it to be downloaded separately? After reading the the three files contained in the module. I wonder whether they provide hyphenation for Greek. Do they?
I must admit that I've been too lazy to really test XeTeX, so I may be wrong here. You can use Unicode input with the module; the only difference would be that you have to wrap all Greek passages in \localgreek{} commands or \start ... \stop pairs. I guess XeTeX provides proper hyphenation for Greek, but - the module has support for more fonts than XeTeX; - does XeTeX allow relative scaling of fonts? Anyway, only Hans and Taco know to what extent I will have to rewrite everything when luatex and support for OpenType fonts are there.
XeTeX allows relative scaling of fonts.
Yes, I started with already existing modules, and it took me a while (and lots of help here on the list) to write my own code. I never actually read any manual cover to cover, but the big manual is almost always open on my computer for reference. I just finished typesetting a book with ConTeXt, complete with dozens of cross-references, indexes, bibliography. Nothing very complicated, but it's wonderful to see that things work. There are still two or three problems, but they are fairly harmless. I love donig my own presentation styles with ConTeXt and metafun. The more I use ConTeXt, the more amazed I am...
Hope this can inspire you a bit
Yes. Tinkering (and asking in the mailing list ;-)) is the way of learning. I have discovered the “Typographic Programming” document style.pdf) which seems very interesting, but unfortunately it is far for being complete. And I guess Hans is too busy to finish this book anytime soon. Thanks, Pablo