Re: Mini-survey: What do you do with ConTeXt?

[Otared KAVIAN <otared@gmail.com>]

On 11/4/05, Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com> wrote:
>
>    What do you do with ConTeXT?

Hi all,

I am a mathematician and I use ConTeXt mainly for my conferences when
I do a presentation on computer. The reasons for which I chose ConTeXt
rather than other TeX macros are:
--- the material typeset with ConTeXt is visually beautiful (one sees
that apart from being a wizard in writing clever macros, Hans Hagen is
also a great artist...)
--- ConTeXt includes (almost) everything from plain-TeX: since for my
papers and other publications I use plain-TeX with some basic macros I
have written, it is easy to port those material into ConTeXt;
--- it is easy to use graphics and MetaPost material in ConTeXt;
--- since I am a Mac user, it is possible to use XeTeX for writing
Right-to-Left material and profit from (almost) all ConTeXt features
(many thanks, among others, to Hans Hagen, Johnaton Kew, Adam Lindsay,
and Gerben Wierda who made this possible). I use XeTeX + ConTeXt for
writing Persian (or Faarsi), which is a non Arabic language using
Arabic alphabet.
Recently I use also ConTeXt for some lecture notes in mathematics for
my students, but unfortunately I gave up learning enough of ConTeXt
capacities to write a book with it... For this still I use plain TeX
and some personal macros, since it seems easier to adapt them to the
publisher's constraints.

I have tried to convince friends and colleagues to use ConTeXt rather
than LaTeX, but I must admit that so far I have not been successful,
since ConTeXt is growing fast and sometimes changes happen to destroy
what one used to be able to do, and that the available documentation
is not very user-friendly (despite the fact that the community on this
list is extremely helpful and friendly to help solve problems and
questions).
The interesting point is that up to now everything I have been
thinking of doing with TeX and computer typesetting, has been found
somewhere in ConTeXt. So I am confident ConTeXt is going to be
stabilized and the documentation made more friendly, little by little,
thanks to all of you...

Best regards: OK