On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm
<hraban@fiee.net> wrote:
Am 2009-05-24 um 19:17 schrieb John Haltiwanger:
1) Can environment files be used across documents, or is it generally understood that every ConTeXt document requires its own environment formatting? (The latter is the view of someone on c.t.t, who said his perception of ConTeXt was that it was for typesetting individual documents and had less application beyond that domain.)
Normally you use environment files for coherent projects (magazines, books) or sets of similar documents (letters, presentations).
The difference in usage between a LaTeX document class and a ConTeXt environment is neglectable IMO. The real difference is that most LaTeX users just *use* some document class unchanged, because LaTeX doesn't encourage defining your own, while there are nearly no ready-to-use ConTeXt environments available and most ConTeXt users want write their own anyway.
For one-off documents I put everything in one file (and perhaps copy setup bits from other one-off files or environments).
If *I* require a special layout for a single document, I normally use InDesign. The effort of "programming" a setup or an environment pays off only if you use it more often IMO.
These paragraphs seems to contradict. ConTeXt is useful if you use an environment more than once, but there are no ready-to-use ConTeXt environments.
I am not averse to rolling my own, I am just confused why, if environments are so powerful and flexible (flexible meaning one can easily change things, unlike document classes), there are no pre-rolled environments available. I am thinking here of standardized thesis environments for universities, or a nice letter environment to demonstrate the beauty of TeX.
2) What is the state of XML output for ConTeXt files? I have to say I will find it hard to justify using TeX for documents if it means they are not translatable to XML easily. I'm also interested in any RDF support ConTeXt might have.
XML is no target format for any TeX implementation.
XML is a source format, and a good one if you want to process (typeset) it with ConTeXt (and perhaps make HTML from the same source).
What do you mean with RDF? This one?: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
Or did you mean RTF?
Yes, I meant RDF. XML is a very important format. I find it odd that TeX can generate PDF but cannot output simple XML. So in order to have a semantical document I must write it in XML and then process it with ConTeXt? Is the capacity there (through LuaTeX perhaps) to write an XML generator?
While I would expect the reasons for wanting XML output would be obvious, a concrete example is that at least one journal is deprecating LaTeX because it wants to archive all of its articles in XML.
Regards,
John C. Haltiwanger