Re: A new manual

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

gnwiii@gmail.com wrote:
>
> I don't agree that lack of a current manual is a big problem for
> potential users of ConteXt. In my experience, the biggest problem is
> with the 3rd party tools (perl, ghostscript, ruby) on Win32 and legacy
> commercial unix (where ruby is not provided and the system perl will
> be a very old version).
>   
actually, one could run context using "pdftex --fmt ...... " but it's 
less convenient;

technically i could generate most of the tuo file directly (although 
index sorting always has to rely on an external prog)

some two pass data (cross ref etc) can be loaded before an aux file is 
written, but toc info cannot, and tex itself cannot rename a temp file 
afterwards; because context can create tocs at any level any time, this 
means that there will always be a need for an separate read and write 
file (actuallym this is also true for more two pass data since some data 
structures may be defined anywhere in teh document which also leads to 
async loading)

in luatex, i will probably write the index sorter in lua as well as 
support a different two pass info model as well which means that in 
principle one could provide an embedded kind of texexec funtionality; of 
course multiple runs still have to be managed by some external script 
then but this can be simple since tex itself can signal the need for that

don't be surprised if contex mkiv provides a different user experience

Hans


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