Achieving the style of Jean-Luc Doumont
Dear list, Years ago I stumbled upon the work of Jean-Luc Doumont. He typesets all his documents using TeX, although his modified Version called Quantum. The whole idea of his fascinating approach is that the page is quantized in 2 dimensions and that all positioning, even graphical elements stick to that grid. I'm attaching a link to a presentation by him in which he gives some fragments of code that I, unfortunately, have a hard time understanding. I'm interested in replicating this 2d grid in Context. How would one go about enforcing such strict 2d organization? As I get it he does a lot of manual tweaking, and his documents are less automated and more hand crafted than a typical Context document. I'm specifically interested in using this approach for report generation. To me data I/O is not an issue since I would use a Python script to generate the markup. I know the question is pretty general, but any pointers would be welcome. Maybe the first thing useful would be the grid and how to position everything in accordance with it. I envisioned this thread more for discussion and suggestions than a complete recreation of his ideas. As I learn Context and Metapost, I hope I will figure out how to recreate his work. Sorry for the blog post :) Link to files: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KpYbDlukvSCirKkFvJICOX3wABl_83bW?usp... Sincerely, Stefan
On Mon, 16 May 2022, Stefan Nedeljkovic via ntg-context wrote:
Dear list,
Years ago I stumbled upon the work of Jean-Luc Doumont. He typesets all his documents using TeX, although his modified Version called Quantum.
His documents are really beautifully typeset. In the book, "Theorems, Maps, and Trees" all paragraphs are typeset as complete rectangles! See a sample here: https://www.principiae.be/book/pdfs/TM&Th-samplepages.pdf
The whole idea of his fascinating approach is that the page is quantized in 2 dimensions and that all positioning, even graphical elements stick to that grid.
ConTeXt already implements grid snapping in the vertical dimension. For "grid snapping" in the horizontal direction, you need to ensure that all \hskip's are multiple of the grid size.
I'm specifically interested in using this approach for report generation. To me data I/O is not an issue since I would use a Python script to generate the markup.
You can use layers to position things anywhere on a page. The keys `lines=..., columns=...` work almost like a grid. See the details manual for examples of grid snapping and layers. Aditya
participants (2)
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Aditya Mahajan -
Stefan Nedeljkovic