[NTG-context] A few questions (mostly about fonts)

[Jeff Smith]

Hi!

I'm fairly new to ConTeXt (which I greatly admire, by the way) and
after reading a couple of provided manuals, I have some lingering
questions. I thank anyone in advance for replying to any number of
them.

The fonts manual mentions how TeX is often qualified as 'the font
mess'. Well, yeah, my head hurts right now... :-( Here are some
font-related issues that are very important to me:

a) Somehow I can't come up with small caps in a Times font. Is this
normal? This happens either by using \sc or \setupcapitals[sc=yes]
along with \cap.

b) LaTeX has a package for the International Phonetic Alphabet called
tipa. Is it possible to use it in ConTeXt? If not, can anybody point
me to the relevant manuals that will help me incorporate official IPA
fonts (say, the TTF version) in my ConTeXt installation? I'm using the
stand-alone Windows distribution, btw.

Two language related issues:

c) There was a French language specific package in LaTeX that made
possible the direct use of accented characters in the source text
(like é, à, ô) without using the explicit commands themselves. Can
this be achieved in ConTeXt (because right now their direct use simply
halts the compiling)? I would believe so, since the manual for French
documents by Peter Münster shows how to set up automatic spacing
before the strong punctuation marks (! ? ; :) without explicit
commands every time. I'm guessing the strategy would be the same with
accented characters, but so far I haven't been able to make it work.

d) Is it possible to build some sort of macro that would automatically
make \quotation marks different when inside another \quotation
command? Basically, we use « » (the French guillemets) as standard
quotation marks, but we use single quotes instead inside another
quotation. At this point, I'd only need a yes or no answer. It would
ease my mind to know there can be a way to streamline this usage of
quotation marks, thereby simplifying greatly the input text.

And finally, a silly question:

e) If purists say that LaTeX is to be pronounced latek, is ConTeXt to
be pronounced contekt? :-)

Thanks for your help!
Jeff Smith
Québec, Canada