Re: Page Numbering Hell

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi,


Bryant Eastham wrote:
> 
> 1. Should I use mkii or mkiv? If mkii, then what should I plan on as
> schedule for upgrading?
> 2. Should I use context or texexec? As I understand, this is the same as
> asking whether to use pdftex or luatex. It may also be related to the
> mkii/mkiv issue, but I am less sure of that.

The (new) version of context that runs on luatex is called mkiv, the
(traditional) version that runs on pdftex as well as xetex is called
mkii.

There are two shell commands: texexec and context. Both of these
can run either mkii (pdftex or xetex) or mkiv (luatex), but they
have different defaults: 'texexec' defaults to mkii and 'context'
defaults to mkiv.

There are not a lot of core differences between mkii and mkiv, but
there are a few. The big thing on the user side is that mkiv is
totally based on Unicode and UTF-8, and knows how to do OpenType font
processing.

It follows that the commands that deal with input regimes and font
encodings are either stubs or missing, there is a slightly longer
list of differences here:

  http://wiki.contextgarden.net/MkIV_Differences

I hope that answers your question.

> 3. What *reference* material exists? I do not need a user guide. Right
> now it has been Google. However, the solutions most recently mentioned
> on the mailing lists seem to dead-end. I am fine with an answer of "see
> the source code" if that is really it.

The closest thing to a short reference is the command index
(texshow-web) at contextgarden:

  http://texshow.contextgarden.net/

However, this is a community effort with a slight lack of actual
community.

The cont-en[pi].pdf is Hans' context manual, which was originally
written in the nineties and is now slightly out of date.

The foundry.supelec.fr project (contextref/context-reference) is a
community attempt to update that manual.

Best wishes,
Taco
___________________________________________________________________________________
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  : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________