Re: Hans political ConTeXt orientation request!

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Maurice Diamantini wrote:

> About math, biblio and context2html missing features
> mentionned in previous discussion,
> some poeples talk about standard document writing, I dont't
> think every body need to write chimical formula, but
> there is a powerfull ConTeXt extension to do it,
> so it's not a valid argument to not
> accept a math package in the ConTeXt distribution.

most of the math that one keys in, is rather bare tex based; macro 
packages may (and do) provide additional features, especially in the 
area of building matrices, breaking formulas and additional symbols

in context the built in support for math is limited to

- symbols
- numbering
- spacing

(and for those who want that, math typesetting on grids). Everything 
else math related is collected in modules:

- math: math module, nath module, mathml module
- physics: units module
- chemistry: ppchtex

the two math modules are maintaind by taco and giusseppe; much of the 
original math module is now distributed over kernel modules and 
m-newmat.tex (but i still need to finish that one); a good alternative 
is the nath module, but since nath is not 'generic' giusseppe had to 
patch some things; when he's satisfied, i'll take a look at his code and 
see what needs to move to the kernel or needs specific support; but for 
most purposes things are already workable

the other 'often asked' functionality concerns bibliographies; there is 
a module by taceo for this; in the future (depending on the developments 
in the bibtex arena) i will look into multilingual bibtex and xml as input

> The raison I tried ConTeXt is to test it for
> a full replacement for LaTeX.
>
> I know that ConTeXt is not finished, and some fonctionnalties
> could be add or corrected later.

hm, most of it is quite finished, although i keep adding functionallity 
to keep up with what high end publishing demands -) 

with regards to 'corrected later': i try to maintain downward 
compatibility (or at least repair it when broken); of course i keep 
improving the overal performance and quality of the output

> I also  know that such a task is not feasable by only one
> person (even by Hans :-)
>
as long as one builds on top of the system and support modules 
(syst-*.tex and supp-*.tex) or uses high level constructs, one can write 
extensions -)

>
> So the only way to make this project realisable is to
> get (stole :-) guru from LaTeX community to ConTeXt.

there are a few context users on this list who know latex quite well -)

> And nobody will contribute in a project that it hasn't
> fully adopted!

hm, keep in mind that in the beginning of tex there  could be some 
influence on that (read: amstex and latex were pushed by user groups in 
favor of for instance  lamstex,  inrstex, etc) ;

concerning contribution: context itself is not that unfinished;  also, 
there *are* contributions, take for instance the area of fonts and 
languages

> For this, one need:
> 1 - a clear polilical objective for context,

hm, i'm not going to promise context-2 (like latex-3), but here are a 
few things on my agenda:

-  some clean up of code and maybe even rewrite of parts of the code 
(esp lists and section handling)
-  converting the low level dutch into english (can be done 
automatically -i  did that some years ago-) but i need a moment of 
'silence' for that
-  support for xsl-fo (i occasionally work on that, when i can motivate 
myself); much of it is finished
-  extending the xml interface definition (with patrick); somehow 
connect that with documentation; create a reverse path, i.e. define 
layouts etc in xml
-  more extensive support for multi media
-  more interfaces as part of the example framework (different thread, 
but of interest to web publishing)
-  (some fun projects)
-  some educational specific things

- reorganizing my documentation tree and putting some source code on line
- extending/updating manuals (i wanted to dedicate time to that earlier 
this year, but adapting to changes in tds / web2c took quite some time)

(ok, i also have todo some projects in order to survive)

(and ... i also want to look into extending tex and metapost)

> 2 - the way (or path, or mean?) adopted for reaching it,
> 3 - the adapted  developpement model,
> 4 - some (elastical) roadmap.

driven by demand

> As I said, I see ConTeXt as a (potencial) full replacement
> for LaTeX. I've writen a technical slide presentation
> and an article like document (20 pages) for testing that.
> I succeded (with some work)
> But for now, I can't encourage a student for begining with
> ConTeXt instead of LaTeX.
>
> On the other side, I (one) can't use both ConTeXt **and**
> LaTeX for doing things: I have to choose only one.

some do -)

Hans