On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 22:23, Peter Davis wrote:

I've been on the periphery of TeX for years, as a casual user of LaTeX and also as an implementer of publishing software.  However, I'm afraid I haven't kept in as close touch as I'd like, and now I find myself trying to absorb a lot in a short time.  I'm trying to choose what software to use in building an XML->TeX workflow. I'd appreciate any help with the following questions:

True or False: TeX can be categorized along three orthogonal axes:

by format (plain TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, others?)

In general true, just a tiny detail; ConTeXt has several formats: - English (cont-en), Dutch (cont-nl), German (cont-de), ... [not too interesting to you, I guess ...] - ConTeXt MKII and ConTeXt MKIV are somehow different formats, but that distinction is already made on the engine basis There are other formats like cstex, cslatex, ..., but they are not too important.

by implementation (web2c, pdfTeX/pdfLaTeX, LuaTeX, others?)

No, that is called "by engine": tex, pdftex, xetex, luatex are the most important ones. Others not too important are known (ptex, ...) MikTeX and TeX Live are not compatible, but I'm not sure how to classify that.

by distribution (MikTeX, TeXLive, MacTeX, others?)

MacTeX is basically TeX Live, repackaged for Mac in a more user-friendly way. Another important distribution for ConTeXt users is "ConTeXt Minimals". There are many other distributions (w32tex, ...), many of them obsolete by now (gwTeX, tetex, emtex, fptex, ...). The most important ones are just MikTeX and TeX Live (including MacTeX), plus minimals for ConTeXt users.

 I was going to use plain TeX, but it seems a lot of features like placing text boxes and graphics anywhere, using system fonts, etc. are more available for LaTeX and ConTeXt.

Using system fonts depends on engine. Only XeTeX and LuaTeX allow that. You can use any system font with plain XeTeX, but it's slightly easier to access the fonts with LaTeX and ConTeXt. (But if you generate the output automatically, it hardly makes a difference.) ConTeXt makes an enormous difference in layout issues. Mojca

On 17-11-2010 10:23, Peter Davis wrote:

1. by format (plain TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, others?)

there are others but they're sort of obsolete

2. by implementation (web2c, pdfTeX/pdfLaTeX, LuaTeX, others?)

see remarks by Mojca: engines (etex, pdftex, xetex, luatex), implementation (web2c, etc), pdflatex is just a format

3. by distribution (MikTeX, TeXLive, MacTeX, others?)

2. True or False: plain TeX and LaTeX(2e) are warhorses ... been around for decades, quirks well known, lots of documentation, etc.

the latex kernel yes, styles and extensions is another matter

3. True or False: ConTeXt is newer, with a lot of built-in features, but still changing quite a bit from build to build.

depends on what you use ... you're not a demanding power user in terms of typeserting and the basic mechanism are ok (mkii does not change at all, while mkiv is developed in sync with luatex) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------