Re: Ideas for restructuring the ConTeXt garden?

[Henry House <hajhouse@hajhouse.org>]

Procházka Lukáš wrote:
[...]
> > 5) how to better promote context to new/latex users?
> 
> For LaTeX incomers: it would be good to provide a sample setup (module?) which would make Ctx generated .pdf looking very closely to that been generated by LaTeX.
> 
> Now, if you see a .pdf document and you are familiar with LaTeX, you recognize immediately whether or not it was generated by LaTeX (Word's signature is also unmatchable).
> 
> If you create a first document with ConTeXt (moreover when migrating from LaTeX), you probably won't be satisfied with the default look (letters too big, heads not bold, spacing before/after heads too different from LaTeX's; and the LaTeX default document looks very "symphonic" in my opinion) (but also I can imagine that many Ctx defaults cannot be changed due to backward compatibility reasons).
> 
> The perfect feature of ConTeXt is that all these features may be systematically altered (often [almost] impossible in LaTeX) but you must search enough and study (and maybe ask the forum) to get the result which would fulfil your aesthetic requirements.

I strongly agree that sample set-up code (ideally well-commented so that
it also serves as a tutorial of sorts) to reproduce the style of LaTeX
would be helpful. The appearance of LaTeX documents isn't perfect but it
produces reasonably high-quality results suitable for complex technical
documents right out of the box of the box without any tweaking, whereas
ConTeXt requires (at least it did for me) some trouble to set it up for
the first time. To some extent this is not because of the merit of the
LaTeX design itself but the fact that it is familiar and therefore
highly readable to someone used to reading it. It is also the point of
departure for a LaTeX user wanting to convert to using ConTeXt; hence, i
would imagine many such people would prefer to tweak a LaTeX-like
document appearance to better suit their needs rather than starting with
something quite different. Certainly, this was the case for me; being
basically satisfied with my LaTeX documents but wanting more control and
the option to use the advanced features of ConTeXt. Having sample set-up
code that emulated LaTeX would have eased the initial transition for me.
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