Re: difference between TeX behavior and ConTeXt

[Lars Huttar <lars_huttar@sil.org>]

On 11/25/2008 3:27 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, Lars Huttar wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've been reading through the TeXbook to solidify the foundations for
>> TeX programming. In an exercise on roman and italic text, ConTeXt seems
>> to behave differently from what the book specifies (Plain TEX) at a
>> fairly fundamental level.
>>
>> I could understand ConTeXt possibly changing the details of \rm's
>> definition, e.g. a change in default font family; but it would really be
>> surprising to find that the logic of \rm's behavior has been changed.
>>
>> Please help me understand if this is a bug or if there is a design
>> principle of ConTeXt that I should be aware of...
> 
> It is a design decision. See the chapter of typography 
> (http://context.aanhet.net/svn/contextman/context-reference/en/co-typography.pdf) 
> in the new manual (under preparation).
> 
> Aditya

Thanks for the explanation.
I hope that when the manual is finished it will make this clearer.
Currently, the draft chapter says
"As will be explained later, the command \rm is used to switch to a
roman/serif/regular style"
which does not seem to be happening.

The explanation of \em shows that ConTeXt's \em has different behavior
from Plain TeX's \it (especially when nesting styles), but doesn't say
that \it or \rm have changed behavior.

Lars
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________