Hans, This is a most lucid explanation. I have been waiting for this myself. To quote the great American philosopher, Corporal Radar O'Reilly, from the television show of the 1970s, M*A*S*H: Ah, Bark! [He was instructed to say Ah, Baaacccch! by Hawkeye Pierce] I apologise in advance for this most peculiar and culturally specific bit of history. Regards.

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Message: 5 Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:58:43 +0100 From: Hans Hagen To: mailing list for ConTeXt users Subject: Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt on the Mac (TexShop). Problem of a newbie Message-ID: <50EEACF3.9040602@wxs.nl> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On 1/10/2013 12:19 PM, Martin Schr?der wrote:

...

2013/1/10 Keith J. Schultz :

...

I am kind of confused about the relationship between luatex and ConTeXt.

http://www.tug.org/levels.html

ConTeXt MkIV needs LuaTeX.

That's a somewhat confusing description.

(1) Context is just a format, so it should be mentioned as format.

(2) We call all instances context, i.e. we don't combine engine names with 'context' so there is no 'pdfcontext', although one could do that.

(3) As there are language dependent user interfaces, we have more formats (cont-en, cont-nl, ...).

(4) We use a management script to run the engine with the context format. Reasons for this are: we need to manage multiple runs, we might need to call intermediate programs (in mkii for instance we need to sort indices).

(5) This also permits us to present to user with an engine independent call to context. In mkii we had 'texexec' (on top of a more generic script manager called texmfstart), in mkiv we have 'context' (and again a script manager called mtxrun).

Now, to come to luatex: this project is quite related to context as it all started in the context community. We also use context for testing and exploring new functionality. For this we use mkiv/mkvi which is a rewrite of context using the full potential of luatex so that we can go beyond what traditional tex engines can do. We explicitly have chosen for a lua + tex combination so that we don't have to hardcode solutions in the engine (macro packages have too many conflicting demands anyway) and are more future proof.

Given that mkii is frozen, and given that type1 fonts are sort of obsolete (context has always been an early adopter of lm and gyre fonts), and given that utf is the way to go (so no messing with input and font encodings any more), and given some more reasons, in practice users will no longer use pdftex and/or xetex but luatex. In that sense context depends on luatex and also keep the development of that engine going.

The philosophy of context is that by having most functionality in the core, users can rather easy create their own styles (the average style has not that many lines anyway). I'm always sort of puzzled when I see remarks that context is close to plain, as I cannot see where that conclusion comes from. The whole reason that context exists is that I didn't want to hack around in low level style files and deal with funny commands having @ in their names.

Hans

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