Am 27.04.10 00:44, schrieb Scott Steele:
> Hullo, all. I've been trying for 3 months now to get my last 2 years' 
> worth of journal entries satisfactorily typeset for printing on 
> lulu.com <http://lulu.com>. This is my first major project using 
> Context (with the Xetex engine—the current procedures required by 
> Pdftex to set up and manage fonts are too intimidating for me (I {\em 
> did} try it.)) as I'm no longer in school and had typeset the 
> preceding year's worth of entries in Latex. I started to use (xe)Latex 
> again this time but gave up in frustration with all of the predefined 
> formatting, which I've moved away from as I've read more of Robert 
> Bringhurst.
>
> Anyway, I have a number of problems.
>
> I apologize for putting them all into one message and for failing to 
> find solutions elsewhere on the site. I've looked around a great deal, 
> but am hampered in doing so by my limiting of my internet time with an 
> {\sc ems} PowerCop (otherwise, I'd be on Wikipedia until they decided 
> to lock me away). (I do my writing, editing, and typesetting on a 
> little internet-crippled netbook with CrunchBang and Vim.)
>
> I'll include my current preämble information at the end of this 
> message in case it is useful in addressing any of my issues. If 
> they're addressed elsewhere, I'd be thrilled with links. If they're 
> not, I'd greatly appreciate any help.
>
> I've found solutions to a number of previous problems, but here are 
> all that I believe are in the way of my finishing this project:
>
> 1
> How do I make bulleted lists not have lines between items in the list?
\startitemize[packed]
>
> 2
> Is it possible to push the bullets for bulleted lists into the margin 
> (and then have the text of each item start at the same level of 
> indentation as normal text)? Also, given my target printing medium, 
> this would require alteration of the space between the bullet mark and 
> its text—how do I alter this and the glyph used as the bullet mark?
\startitemize[margin]
> 3
> Is it possible to alter the way footnotes are displayed? I might want 
> to have new footnotes follow previous ones with a 3-em space rather 
> than starting a new line in the footer. And if I go that route, I'd 
> need a way to pull the footer number in from the margin.
>
> 4
> How can I adjust the formatting settings for the frontmatter (title 
> page, table of contents) and backmatter (colophon, appendices, index). 
> In general, I need to be able to set whether page numbers are used and 
> what kind and positioning of the text on the page. In particular, how 
> do I change the formatting for items in the table of contents (and 
> what glyph/spacing go between the item's title and corresponding page 
> number as well as how all of those elements are positioned)?
Look for \setuplist[...] in the wiki and manuals.
> 5
> How can I have either unnumbered sections, or subjects that appear in 
> the table of contents?
\setuphead[subject][incrementnumber=list]
> 6
> Does Xetex or Context have a facility for positioning accents over 
> letters when those particular combinations are not in the font? (Or 
> should I just go ahead and do this manually in Fontforge?)
>
> 7
> Is there a built-in equivalent of the \fancybreak function from Latex? 
> I think I know now how to put something like it together manually but 
> don't want go the amateur route if there's something more polished 
> available.
What is \fanybreak supposed to do?
> 8
> Since this is just a journal, I have used simple emoticons (don't 
> laugh!). I tweaked a vector smiley from Wikimedia to get a frowny and 
> slashy, and they work well except for when they end up on the first 
> (printed) text line of a page. I have one page that has a subject 
> title on the grid but that is followed by a (logical) line with a 
> smiley that ends up on its first printed line. This printed line and 
> all of the rest of the text on the page (including another subject 
> title) sit several points (approx) lower than where they should (so 
> that the grid lines bisect the bowls of all the lower-case a's). There 
> is another page that does not start with a subject title but directly 
> with a printed line containing an emoticon, and it has exactly the 
> same problem as the first page, with the text sitting just low enough 
> that the grid lines bisect the bowls of the lower-case a's. Pages with 
> emoticons on them do not exhibit this problem when the emoticon is not 
> on the first printed line, and all lines remain correctly positioned 
> on the grid. You can see below how I'm putting in the emoticons.
You can write '\dontleavehmode\Frowny' or you include \dontleavehmode in 
the defintion itself

\def\Frowny{\dontleavehmode\externalfigure[frowny]}

Wolfgang