Kári Hreinsson wrote:

Hello,

I have been trying to use ConTeXt for setting up a book with a list of students in my school, with pictures of them, phone numbers, emails and such.

I thought I could use ConTeXt for the job since LaTeX gave me much trouble in trying to alter the layout and look of the page.

I found the "layer" feature in ConTeXt which I found very interesting and thought I could use it to position items (such as text info, images and the layout) within these layers since they offer very precise positioning with a x-y grid like system.

When I was trying to use this feature for multipage document it cut of all of the pages except the first. I found out that the layers weren't thought to be part of the content of the file but more like a background and I can't figure out how to use them on many pages without placing something like a dot on every page. Is there any way to do this?

If "a dot" is the source of all your problems, you can easily solve this by placing a \strut instead of a dot at the top of the page. (Perhaps even \null would do.) \strut is an empty box with width zero and height of "one line" (generally speaking). I was confused for a long time since there are at least five different ways to achieve the desired results, each one with its advantages and drawbacks, so you may have to be even more specific about the layout. You can do the whole page with layers if you are sure that you want to provite all the coordinates by hand. If you use an alternative way (if you place a figure at the left or right side of text for example), space will be reserved and text will flow around the figure. If you place a figure in a layer, you'll have to manually adjust text width/height/hole, so that it won't overlap with the figure. Some alternatives to layers that come to my mind in the first moment are: 1. tables (http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Tables_Overview) with \bTABLE ... \eTABLE you can manully specify widths and heights of table cells and put photos in the left cell with specified width. The rest of data can go to the remaining cells on the right with automatically determined widths and heights. 2. grid typesetting http://pragma-ade.nl/general/manuals/details.pdf you can position the stuff on the grid (still precise, but in other units than centimeters) 3. http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Chromatograms uses \startpositioning ... \stoppositioning, which is probably something similar to layers. I never used it, but perhaps you can take a look if you find it useful. 4. many other ways for sure (depending on your needs), in worst case even plain TeX ;)

I discovered that the layers were "inserted" into the document via "\setupbackgrounds[page]" so I understand why it acts like this but I am asking if there is some way of getting layers working like I want?

How is that? You can place layers in other ways than on the whole page (you can say that a layer has to be two centimeters from the bottom and three centimeters from the left edge or that it has to be 1cm wider than the text area of the page), you can put them in the backgrond or on the top of text, but you can't prevent them from being invisible to the rest of the page content (you can't place a layer and expect a text portion to flow around that layer).

Maybe I am going in completely wrong way? Is there any other good way to do this, that is positioning items with x-y coordinates or something totally different that I am missing?

see above (tables, grid, ...)

Another thing I was wondering about is how to make items like images bleed (that is to go over the edge of the paper, to avoid white lines at the margin). Can I use negative values for positioning to achive that?

You have a couple of examples in the official documentation (page 32 of details.pdf for example). google.com: "bleeding site:pragma-ade.com" If you position using frames, you can use negative values, yes. (See the example below.)

All help is greatly appreciated since I am not understanding this and I haven't found much help on the internet regarding this subject (contextgarden had only one example page that had layers).

Patrick already mentioned the new "search engine ;)" through articles. I often use google.com and "layers site:contextgarden.net" for example. You can find a lot in old mailing list archives. \setuppapersize [A4][A4] \definelayer [page] [width=\paperwidth, height=\paperheight] \setupbackgrounds [page] [background=page] \setupexternalfigures [location={local,global,default}] \setupframed [align=middle, frame=on] \starttext \startstandardmakeup \setlayerframed [page] [voffset=1cm, hoffset=-2cm, preset=lefttop] %[width=xxx] {\externalfigure[cow]} \setlayerframed [page] [voffset=10cm, preset=lefttop, width=\paperwidth, frame=off, align=middle] {\bfc Cut the head!} \stopstandardmakeup \stoptext

� wrote:

When I was trying to use this feature for multipage document it cut of all of the pages except the first. I found out that the layers weren't thought to be part of the content of the file but more like a background and I can't figure out how to use them on many pages without placing something like a dot on every page. Is there any way to do this? I discovered that the layers were "inserted" into the document via "\setupbackgrounds[page]" so I understand why it acts like this but I am asking if there is some way of getting layers working like I want?

was this solved? (btw, if you are positioning things in a n by n way, an option is to use small pages (A7 or so) and ise the page imposition xy feature to collect them on a page)

Another thing I was wondering about is how to make items like images bleed (that is to go over the edge of the paper, to avoid white lines at the margin). Can I use negative values for positioning to achive that?

indeed, \setposition[...][hoffset=2mm,voffset=-2mm,...] (in principle h(v)offset and x(y) do similar things but having two keys for each makes it possibel to separate the bleed from the positioning) Hans