[NTG-context] Achieving the style of Jean-Luc Doumont

[Aditya Mahajan]

On Mon, 16 May 2022, Stefan Nedeljkovic via ntg-context wrote:

> Dear list,
> 
> Years ago I stumbled upon the work of Jean-Luc Doumont. He typesets all his
> documents using TeX, although his modified Version called Quantum. 

His documents are really beautifully typeset. In the book, "Theorems, Maps, and Trees" all paragraphs are typeset as complete rectangles! See a sample here: 

https://www.principiae.be/book/pdfs/TM&Th-samplepages.pdf

> The whole idea of his fascinating approach is that the page is quantized in 2
> dimensions and that all positioning, even graphical elements stick to that
> grid. 

ConTeXt already implements grid snapping in the vertical dimension. For "grid snapping" in the horizontal direction, you need to ensure that all \hskip's are multiple of the grid size. 

> I'm specifically interested in using this approach for report generation. To
> me data I/O is not an issue since I would use a Python script to generate the
> markup.

You can use layers to position things anywhere on a page. The keys `lines=..., columns=...` work almost like a grid. 

See the details manual for examples of grid snapping and layers. 


Aditya