Fwd: Re: Manual (English) Update soon?
Subject: Re: [NTG-context] Manual (English) Update soon?
Date: Thursday 28 December 2006 20:58
From: "John R. Culleton"
kind-of-obsolete with pdfTeX or XeTeX. The same story with just about any package for creating slides or changing page layout, headers, footers (and they all took a lot of time to learn how to use them), not to mention the changes in base LaTeX (documentstyle -> documentclass{article} -> Komma script) and the fact that most packages become unmaintained after they have been written.
Jut FYI PSTricks (which runs on Plain TeX as well as LaTeX) can be run as part of Context. It requires loading a module and an extra pass. Like many of the "undocumented" modules there is actually documentation in the module itself. I suspect that if all the documentation in the source code were collected and organized in some way we would have a new Context Manual.
And so I am wondering if ConTeXt is still too fresh...
If I have a simple job I use pdftex. If the layout gets complicated at all, or I need to impose a smaller page on a full size page, or anything else like that I turn to Context.
It's always full of surprizes. But what do you mean with "too fresh"? If you're worried that your colleagues don't have the latest version of ConTeXt installed (and thus won't be able to compile your code) then you're probably right. (But if you want to use the latest packeg from LaTeX, there's even more chance that they won't have it. In ConTeXt you know at least that downloading one thing should suffice.)
The bad thing about Context is that many errors in parameters etc. are simply not reported when you compile a document. One of the many good things is that the elaborate structure is there but not required. Most plain TeX (the old stuff) documents will run under Context. Make a file with: Hello world \bye and run it through Context. It will work. But with LaTeX you must have a LaTeX specific statement or two or it won't work.
and if I'll have any chance of figuring out what/how to use it without having been on this list for the past 4+ years...
I store all messages on this list forever in a directory. It is more convenient for me to search that directory than on the wiki. My earliest is dated in April 2002. Font handling is a bear but font handling in any version of TeX more complex than plain is a bear. -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com ------------------------------------------------------- -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com
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John R. Culleton