Re: ConTeXt project structure?

[Gerben Wierda <Sherlock@rna.nl>]

On Tuesday, Jul 22, 2003, at 14:05 Europe/Amsterdam, Willi Egger wrote:

> Hi Gerben,
>
> The basic idea is not that complicated:
>
> The project(file) is the cuboard
> The product(file)s are drawers of the cupboard
> The component(file)s are boxes in one of the drawers whithin the 
> cupboard.
>
> Teh environment is used to handle the whole project.
>
>> Is there a good example somewhere?
>>
> Whether is is a good example you will have to decide...

> <project.tex>

This helped, but I am not there yet. I would like to think of this in a 
more concept-oriented idea

A project contains all products created from the same sources

A product us something that could ship separately. Hence a chapter is 
generally not a product but a presentation versus a booklet is.

A component is something with which you build products. You do not ship 
these separately, but you may work on them separately. The chapters of 
a book are natural components for me. I will never ship chapter1.pdf 
but I might want to work on my book one chapter at a time.

In your example, a chapter is a product. You produce different what I 
would call `products' by using different modes.

That is confusing for me. Never mind the cupboard and drawers, I am 
writing a book, in final, concept, screen formats as well as a 
presentation. So, I would say, presentation and book are two different 
products and final, concept and screen are different modes for product 
book.

And as an extra, I would like to use a good directory structure. But 
the way ConTeXt searches, my product files need to be deeper nested 
than my chapter sources. This is OK to me, but then the whole project 
file loses its role because there has to be a copy of this in each 
subdirectory.

I am writing this, so ConTeXt experts can see the kind of confusion a 
newbie like me can end up in.

One more thing. ConTeXt relies heavily on texexec. Giving different 
flags to texexec might be easy from the command line, but many 
frontends have fixed typesetting commands you can choose from (e.g. 
pdflatex and texexec --pdf). Having a different texexec call depending 
on what you want may not be compatible with using a gui frontend, 
unless the frontend enables setting a call per file (which makes it a 
complicated frontend). I know I can set texexec stuff in teh first line 
of a file, but I r ather not do that because other programs try to do 
the same thing (we need a TeX-file preamble syntax, a bit like 
PostScript has).

G