On Sep 11, 2008, at 7:21 AM, Goebel, Juergen wrote:

ACK. Accustomed to LaTeX this handling had the feeling of TeX, but of course it isn't. Nevertheless I'm afraid I'm going to have a hard time to learn this. The next problem(s) are already in the pipeline.

Juergen

Of course all of this is highly personal, and everyone is bound to find the solution he's been working with for a long time "natural" and everything else "difficult" or "clumsy." Nevertheless: if you want to write more than just a few trivial macros, you will appreciate all the system tools that ConTeXt provides. When I started using TeX, I tried LaTeX, but if you want configurable macros, you have to use additional packages such as ifthen, keyval or xkeyval. I found their use extremely clumsy and their documentation horrible. Doing conditionals in pure TeX isn't easy either. ConTeXt, on the other hand, provides a wealth of consistent \doif... tests; they are logical and easy to use. The key=val parser is maybe the center of the entire ConteXt philosophy and a wonderful mechanism, and even a completely non-CS, non-scientific user such as I am can learn how to use it. You should really read the wiki section I recommended (there is also a pdf version at http://tex.aanhet.net/context/syst-gen-doc.pdf, so if you want to read it offline, just download it. Hey Taco, we're still waiting for part 2...) and you will soon appreciate the elegance and ease of use of these macros. Thomas