Re: The ConTeXt book

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@atos.wmid.amu.edu.pl>]

Dnia Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 08:51:03AM -0500, Michael Saunders napisał(a):
> Because I think it might be possible to produce better output with
> Context than with LaTeX (is this true?).  My experience has been quite
> different from yours.  I got up an running with LaTeX in a week (in
> 1995), found the documentation clear and almost any effect I wanted
> easy to achieve with well-documented packages that never seriously
> conflicted.  This, on the other hand, is a nightmare.

Yep. But when you actually run into one of these problems in LaTeX, you
are often more or less left alone - unlike ConTeXt and this list.

A few examples: tikz (for some obscure reason) breaks some functionality
of empheq; align in intertext in align (yes, I needed something like
this!) in AMS-LaTeX doesn't work; hacking the (otherwise excellent)
amsrefs package (or any AMS-LaTeX package, for that matter) is a real
pain, but sometimes you just need it (for example, amsthm may be a
standard, but it just sucks in quite a few respects!).

============

My general thought on this discussion: someone said "why don't people
switch from LaTeX to ConTeXt if ConTeXt is better?".  The answer is
obvious to me.  First: 99% maths journals accept LaTeX, \epsilon of them
(if any) accept ConTeXt.  Second: people still use their LaTeX 2.09
preambles from the nineties, and spending even 30 minutes on learning a
new package (or just not using $$ ... $$ but \[ ... \] or anything)
seems impossible for them.  Third: sadly, nearly anyone just does not
care whether the results are beautiful or ugly; people (I'm talking
about mathematicians now) use (La|AMS|Con)TeX(t) not because it is
better than (word|OO), but because that is what journals want.

Personally, I use both LaTeX and ConTeXt: LaTeX when I need something
done quickly or when I want to share some code with others (who usually
use LaTeX), and ConTeXt when I have some time and want to learn
something new (or when I have a ready template which *just works(TM)*.)

Cheers

-- 
Marcin Borkowski (http://mbork.pl)
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