On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 10:13:31 +0100 "luigi scarso" wrote:

hmm...boh.

:-)

It depends: I prefear one email for each question plus an example to test;

OK. Will remember for the future...

but maybe your questions are easy, so it's better one email . (BTW, it's not easy to say which questions are trivials )

My writing needs are from short & simple docs (1--few pages long) over preparing educational presentations (with handouts) illustrated with graphics (both images & SVG) for seminars (beamer-like) to be used with video-projector in classroom-like environments upt to the full size books by using Croatian & English languages and Sanskrit diacritics (not Devanagari at the moment :-) So I'm interested whether: 1) ConTeXt can support all the above requirements? (In the past there were issues with some Croatian chars - iirc - đ & Đ and some utf-8 problems in general.) 2) If I start with XeTeX engine, will those documents will be compatible with Mark IV? 3) can one run luaTeX on x86_64 (I use Arch Linux & texlive) ? 4) how good is ConTeXt support in AUCTeX and what is the prospect to get preview-ConTeXt? 5) I read LaTeX in proper ConTeXt pdf, but I'm interested is there some helper to convert classical LaTeX book (book class) to ConTeXt? I've two books which I'm considering to publish as one (~1000p) in the future, so any help in conversion would be nice. 6) the most important issue - by looking at luaTeX docs & archives I noticed that it was mentioned there is some book on ConTeXt in preparation - I gave up on ConTeXt in the past due to this reason - lack of up-to-date documentation - didn't have enough time to try to sovle the puzzle by inspecting different 'magazines' etc. cause I was able to do the kob with LaTeX for which I've documentation in the form of paper books. I have high appreciation for the ConTeXt package, as well as the present luaTeX development, but before diving into adventure of learning the (new) macro package (as investment for the future), I'm curious to know what is the present situation with the docs and/or if one can expect to buy some dead-tree version of it in the not-so-distant future? I hope the above questions are not too difficult so they justify putting them in a single email. Sincerely, Gour

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:00:48 +0100 Jean Magnan de Bornier wrote: [...] Thanks.

AucTeX support for ConTeXt is quite good, but I fear that a preview-latex equivalent is out of reach now (although is has been announced a while back).

I explored mailing-archives a bit, but didn't find much :-( so I sent a post to the list.

welcome !

Thank you. Sincerely, Gour

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:33:12 +0100 "Mojca Miklavec" wrote:

Yes, except that there is no beamer package available in ConTeXt , but theoretically "anything can be done".

Sure ;)

In addition to the core functionality: http://modules.contextgarden.net/taspresent http://modules.contextgarden.net/t-rsteps

Thanks.

2.56$ for the first buggy đ found in ConTeXt :-)

He, he...let's try...

(We'll drop that letter from our keyboards soon :)

Oh, then I'll stay with friendly lyx/latex...

That was before anyone started complaining about its non-functionality :).

When I was exploring ConTeXt I was told about that from someone else. Strange, it was going on...

Now, unless fonts are problematic, it should work flawlessly. (not with texfont, since it uses ec.enc which is broken, but texfont is now a history anyway)

Let it stay 'history'.

Which general utf-8 problems? There might be some issues every now and then (in pdfTeX each character has to be defined separately and in LuaTeX there might be some new unpolished/non-debugged features), but they're usually resolved once someone complains. Exotic scripts don't work in pdfTeX of course.

See ml's archives in '02. utf-8 support was quite young then and I thought XML has some value :-)

You can always write incompatible code (by using XeTeX primitives),

Not soon :-)

but in general you should be able to process XeTeX (ConTeXt) documents with LuaTeX without any problem (the only warning sign is that font definitions might still change a bit, but that only means changing a few top lines in your style file). i

Ohh, that's cool...the work is under the hood...

The reverse is not neccessary true since you cannot use Lua in XeTeX.

Sure.

...

3) can one run luaTeX on x86_64 (I use Arch Linux & texlive) ?

Sure.

That's nice. Both laptop & desktop are 64-bit here.

AUCTeX is LaTeX oriented I guess, but I don't knom the details.

It says it supports ConTeXt and it does ;)

It always depends on source, so creating a general converter is impossible. I would run "search and replace" a few times (depending on source), but that cannot solve everything.

OK. This is not the rush. What about my last point: docs ? Sincerely, Gour

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:09:49 +0100 "Mojca Miklavec" wrote:

...

...

(We'll drop that letter from our keyboards soon :)

Oh, then I'll stay with friendly lyx/latex...

What does lyx have to do with đ and the (Slovenian) keyboard?

Ahh, I understood you will start a party to remove support for 'đ' from ConTeXt as well :-)

Most problems have been resolved about two years ago. But it's true - đ didn't work for at least half a dozen of different reasons :)

ok, ok...I'm 50% sold-out to move to ConTeXt ;)

2002? That must be somewhere aroud the bronze age for ConTeXt :-)

Now is golden age?

Well ... I would say ... you need to start somewhere and once you stumble upon something you don't know how to convert, ask on the list.

Sure. I'll soon start posting when attempting to mimic some LaTeX behaviour.

That's a taboo, that's why your original question has been removed :)

Heh, that's why I felt some bad-smell...well, maybe I'm more persistent this time and/or someone is bold enough to speak about taboos :-) Sincerely, Gour

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 05:57:03 -0700, Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

The ConTeXt manual, very difficult topic. All of us want it, nobody is able or motivated enough to write, we have a few experts for every topic (mathematics, fonts etc.) but none who who has knowledge about the whole system and too mayn features are hidden and only documented in the source.

Which is why we need a team :-) Anyway, as soon as luatex/mkiv is relatively stable, the hyperbola is still a bit too far from the asymptote at the moment... Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief International Journal of Shi`i Studies Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523 -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

Gour wrote:

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 08:39:56 -0700 "Idris Samawi Hamid" wrote:

...

Which is why we need a team :-)

Right. This sounds as reasonable proposal - let every expert writes his/her part.

...

Anyway, as soon as luatex/mkiv is relatively stable, the hyperbola is still a bit too far from the asymptote at the moment...

Hmm, isn't luatex already quite stable?

yes and no ... luatex's interfaces may change, as may some functionality (much starts as experiment, is tested, evolves, is optimized, etc); however, as long as you update the binaries and context mkiv at the same time you should be able to use it; about august 2008 much of the current api will stabelize; august 2009 we hope to have a complete api i'm using luatex/mkiv is some projects since it's the only way to really torture test it (since taco and i are more or less constantly working on luatex/mkiv this is doable) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 23:43:35 -0700, Gour wrote:

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 08:39:56 -0700 "Idris Samawi Hamid" wrote:

...

Which is why we need a team :-)

Right. This sounds as reasonable proposal - let every expert writes his/her part.

...

Anyway, as soon as luatex/mkiv is relatively stable, the hyperbola is still a bit too far from the asymptote at the moment...

Hmm, isn't luatex already quite stable?

It's in beta but there is still a ways to go and features etc. may change... same for mkiv (the ConTeXt interface) But we're getting there... Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief International Journal of Shi`i Studies Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523 -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 13:57:03 +0100 Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

You should use XeTeX or LuaTeX and you're free from any problem because đ is now a normal letter as any other character and you could use all letters in label texts without problems.

Good. I plan to use LuaTeX if it is capable to typeset what I need. Sincerely, Gour

On 12/24/07, Aditya Mahajan wrote: On Sat, 22 Dec 2007, Gour wrote:

...

5) I read LaTeX in proper ConTeXt pdf, but I'm interested is there some helper to convert classical LaTeX book (book class) to ConTeXt? I've two books which I'm considering to publish as one (~1000p) in the future, so any help in conversion would be nice.

I do this quite often (ConTeXt -> LaTeX), so I am just writing my thoughts about this. A general purpose translator from ConTeXt to LaTeX is VERY difficult, because of the nature of both macro languages. However, it is relatively simple to convert a subset of one to the other. Currently, I write most of my papers in ConTeXt. For the final version of the paper, most journals want LaTeX. I know my style of writing ConTeXt, and can easily convert 95% percent of it to LaTeX using regular expressions (and have been thinking of exploring gema in more detail: http://gema.sourceforge.net/). It is easier to do the rest by hand rather than writing a script that takes care of all the corner cases. Usually it takes me around 2 hours to convert a (30-40 page) paper from ConTeXt to LaTeX. Since this needs to be done only once every six months or so, I have not spent too much time trying to optimize my approach. I think that the same will be true for conversion from LaTeX to ConTeXt. However, I would suggest that you start by writing some ConTeXt documents by hand, before you automate the conversion. This way, you will know what you want to achieve from a conversion script.

This is consistent with my experience. I suggest that anyone considering such conversions creating a simple test document with one example of each construct you use. I took Lamport's sample2e.tex, added a figure and a table, and then made a context version which is part of my test suite for new tex installations. -- George N. White III Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia