From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.comp.tex.context/32340 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "John R. Culleton" Newsgroups: gmane.comp.tex.context Subject: Fwd: Re: Manual (English) Update soon? 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Date: Thursday 28 December 2006 20:58 From: "John R. Culleton" To: ntg-context@ntg.nl Cc: "Mojca Miklavec" 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 Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com ------------------------------------------------------- -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com