Re: newbie questions

[Pontus Lurcock <pont@talvi.net>]

On Tue 31 May 2011, Sanja C. wrote:

> a) Is the ConTeXt project alive? The newest PDF documentation I
> could find seems to be from 2007; most of it is dated 2003 or older.

Very much alive! See http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Release_Notes for a
list of recent releases (though betas come along much more
frequently). While the documentation is voluminous it can be hard to
navigate -- my order of searching tends to be wiki, manuals, mailing
list. The old reference manual is indeed a little dated, but there's a
new one under development at
http://foundry.supelec.fr/gf/project/contextman/scmsvn/?action=browse&path=%2Fcontext-reference%2F
.

>   - Support for elaborate, colorful, graphics-heavy design, which I
> would preferably create in Inkscape and then export as vector
> graphics (or port to ConTeXt's own graphics language) as necessary.

If you're generating graphics externally they can be as elaborate as
you like -- just export as a PDF and include in your document. If you
have complex design that needs to be integrated with the text -- e.g.
non-rectangular columns or text flowing around arbitrary shapes -- I
think this is possible but it might take a lot of work.

>  - Ability to write a style *once* (with reasonable effort), and
> "outsource" it to an external file (or files), so that for each new
> release of the newsletter, only a simple content TeX file (or files)
> with minimal amount of markup

I regard this as a major strength of ConTeXt, and I certainly found it
much easier to produce a ConTeXt style than to do the equivalent when
I was using LaTeX. See http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Project_structure
for the recommended way to structure such things.

>  - Ability to easily include pictures in the content, and let the
> typesetting engine automatically position them (either in the main
> text area with text floating around them, or in special margin
> areas).

Yes.

> c) Are there any full-featured examples of design-heavy
> booklets/magazines/etc created with ConTeXt., for which the full
> source code is publicly available?

I think the sources for the manuals themselves are probably the
biggest publicly available example of ConTeXt in action. Magazines
seldom release their source code, alas.

You may want to look at
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Biochemistry_textbook and the linked
example output for an idea of what a style file looks like and how it
is applied. Demonstrates figure positioning nicely too. The source
code for the book itself is not available, though.

Hope this helps,

Pont
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