Welcome to ConTeXt! I'm a relatively new user so my answers will be brief and partial, but I'm sure others will be able to expand on them. On Tue 13 Dec 2011, Chris Lott wrote:

1) My work is primarily in the humanities and end-user technologies, with small amounts of coding. So mathematics isn't an issue. I do a fair amount of highly academic writing (aka: many sections, citations [handling this in a sensible way is really important], footnotes) with the occasional need for charts, graphs, and photos. In other words, I'm not doing the kind of layout one might associate with InDesign or the like. I also write many paper letters (personal), poetry, fiction, essays, and the like.

This looks to me like a good use case for ConTeXt. I've used it for a 380-page dissertation with the full complement of academic paraphernalia: footnotes, appendices, table of figures, citations etc. which all worked well for me. I believe that many others are using it for similar work.

2) That said, I (obviously) have a keen interest in typography, and that includes wanting to use some particular typefaces... I've paid good money for many of them, so why not?

I've found ConTeXt to be more pleasant than LaTeX for setting up the layout and typography according to my wishes. (When I used LaTeX I generally just went with the default layout and accepted that things would be a little ugly.) ConTeXt is also good about letting you use your own typefaces -- particularly if they're in OpenType format.

3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice.

4) How about X/HTML? this is my lowest level need but, again, it would be nice.

I know that ConTeXt supports direct XHTML output but I'm not sure how mature it is -- I think someone else will be able to provide a more complete answer to this.

So, do you think ConTeXt makes more sense than LaTeX? And *what* is the deal with xetex? It seems to be the easiest way for accessing all my fonts, but it also hasn't been updated for years and, since it is tied to an old version of ConTeXt (as far as I can tell) it doesn't seem like much of a winner.

In short, there are two versions of ConTeXt: Mk II (stable, and frozen for some time now) and Mk IV (actively developed, new betas more than once a month). Mk II can use pdftex or xetex as the engine; Mk IV uses luatex, which provides the ‘it just works’ font handling of xetex alongside a number of other features (chiefly the integration of the lua scripting language). Despite the worries that may be occasionaed by the word ‘beta’, Mk IV is pretty stable and definitely the recommended option these days. Hope this helps! Pont

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 07:14, Chris Lott wrote:

3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice.

ConTeXt only support XHTML to some extent. Now that xhtml backend is done, creating support for rtf should be a lot easier to do than before xhtml export was there, but unless some substantial funding is found, it is unlikely to ever be implemented. Honestly I see no reason why anyone would want to have RTF. Even if your colleagues get a document in RTF and fix a few things, it won't at all be easy to integrate that back. tex4ht most probably offers export to RTF, but since author's death it is nearly impossible to request any substantial feature. I bet that ConTeXt doesn't work with tex4ht any more. Roger suggested markdown/pandoc. It is limited to some extent, but if you are happy with its set of features, you could probably use it for export into both RTF and XHMTL. Of course then you can forget about lua sugars in ConTeXt ...

And *what* is the deal with xetex? It seems to be the easiest way for accessing all my fonts, but it also hasn't been updated for years and, since it is tied to an old version of ConTeXt (as far as I can tell) it doesn't seem like much of a winner.

In ConTeXt MKIV with LuaTeX it is just as easy to access the fonts as it is in XeTeX. (It is only in plain LuaTeX that accessing fonts needs some fiddling.) You get even more flexibility. With XeTeX there are two major problems: 1.) ConTeXt never took advantages of all of its features. Ever since LuaTeX came to the scene, support for XeTeX in ConTeXt was pretty much frozen. XeTeX still works as well as pdfTeX, with the option to load OTF fonts, but there is no high-level support for some other low-level language-related features (interchar tokens, ...) or OpenType math (but that one is broken in XeTeX anyway). 2.) no maintenance of engine (no bugfixing) Still, XeTeX is able to handle some exotic scripts for which there is no support in ConTeXt yet, but that shouldn't be an issue for you. Mojca