[NTG-context] About Latex compatibility module

[Hans Hagen]

On 5/24/2020 1:43 AM, Jairo A. del Rio wrote:
> Hi everyone! I was reading some old posts on TeX.SX about LaTeX support 
> on ConTeXt and I found the following:
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/20110822085249/https://modules.contextgarden.net/LaTeX
> 
> However, not only the module seems to be deprecated, but there's no more 
> info about the module now (links are broken and the like). Btw the test 
> file (latextest.tex) included fails to compile:
> 
>  > tex error on line 165 in file t-ltmsen.tex: ! Undefined control sequence
> 
>  >> \newskip\@rightskip \@rightskip \z at skip

looks like someplace one has to define \z at skip to be 0pt (in this case 
it's actually redundant code because a newskip is likely to be zero)

> Is it possible to make it work? I think it would be nice if some minimal 
> LaTeX macros were supported. Thank you in advance!
Depends. It's not that hard to define some basic 'handle some latex 
cases' module but the question is "for what purpose?". When I look at 
those decade old files in that archive I see a lot of messy code that 
one needs to isolate and even then we can assume that users use more 
than a few commands. When they only use the top-ten commands, no 
problem, but when they start setting lengths or so ... why use context 
then. I have no problem mapping a few commands so that new users can 
cut-n-paste some code as a starter but somehoen has to come up with the 
list of commands and minimal test files then.

Apart from the (probably a bit boring) challenge I think it doesn't pay 
off. Also, the systems are conceptually too different I think.

Hans

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