Re: Manual (English) Update soon?

["John R. Culleton" <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Thursday 28 December 2006 19:43, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
 then I finally discovered PSTricks which became
> kind-of-obsolete with pdfTeX or XeTeX. The same story with just about
> any package for creating slides or changing page layout, headers,
> footers (and they all took a lot of time to learn how to use them),
> not to mention the changes in base LaTeX (documentstyle ->
> documentclass{article} -> Komma script) and the fact that most
> packages become unmaintained after they have been written.
>
Jut FYI PSTricks (which runs on Plain TeX as well as LaTeX) can be run as part 
of Context. It requires loading a module and an extra pass.  Like many of 
the "undocumented" modules there is actually documentation in the module 
itself.  I suspect that if all the documentation in the source code were 
collected and organized in some way we would have a new Context Manual. 
> > And so I am wondering if ConTeXt is still too fresh...
>
If I have a simple job I use pdftex. If the layout gets complicated at all, or 
I need to impose a smaller page on a full size page, or anything else like 
that I turn to Context.
 
> It's always full of surprizes. But what do you mean with "too fresh"?
> If you're worried that your colleagues don't have the latest version
> of ConTeXt installed (and thus won't be able to compile your code)
> then you're probably right. (But if you want to use the latest packeg
> from LaTeX, there's even more chance that they won't have it. In
> ConTeXt you know at least that downloading one thing should suffice.)
>
The bad thing about Context is that many errors in parameters etc. are simply 
not reported when you compile a document.  One of the many good things is 
that the elaborate structure is there but not required.  Most plain TeX  (the 
old stuff) documents will run under Context.  Make a file with:

Hello world
\bye

and run it through Context. It will work. But with LaTeX you must have a LaTeX 
specific statement or two or it won't work. 

> > and if I'll
> > have any chance of figuring out what/how to use it without having
> > been on this list for the past 4+ years...
>

I store all messages on this list forever in a directory.  It is more 
convenient for me to search that directory  than on the wiki.  My earliest is 
dated in April 2002.

Font handling is a bear but font handling in any version of TeX more complex 
than plain is a bear. 
 

-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexing and Typesetting
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