Re: Page Numbering Hell

["Bryant Eastham" <beastham@pewla.us.pewg.panasonic.com>]

All:

Alan comments below on my "aggressive" post. I apologize if it was seen
that way. I am serious in my evaluation of ConTeXt, and my questions are
quite serious as well.

I cannot justify the effort in and cost of converting some 35 documents
(many hundreds of pages) into a new format without an evaluation of the
format and related tools.

So, to restate my questions (potentially less aggressively), and in view
of switching our entire technical documentation to ConTeXt:

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.
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.

And I would still love a short, working example based on previous
request.

-Bryant

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan BRASLAU [mailto:alan.braslau@cea.fr] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 10:01 AM
To: Bryant Eastham; ntg-context@ntg.nl
Subject: Re: [NTG-context] Page Numbering Hell

On Wednesday 21 October 2009 16:24:47 Bryant Eastham wrote:
> 
> However, I find it interesting that in your response there was not a
> single real answer to any of my direct questions, nor a working
example
> of what you admit should be a "simple matter".

I clearly wrote that I find the new structure code to be a bit
confusing, and invited "experts" to answer your specific questions
(also commented in my framework "example"):
> % missing setups to:
> % 1. frontmatter pagenumbering conversion=romannumerals
> % 2. bodymatter pagenumbering "chapter-page"
> % 3. reset pagenumber for each chapter
> % 4. add blank pages if necessary to start chapters on odd pages.
It should be simple, but I have not taken the time/not had the need
to look into this. Perhaps someone can easily fill this in
(that is if not put-off by the agressivity of the posting).

> However, I
> believe that my original statements, which boil down to "This thing
may
> be great, but it needs to be documented (or where is it documented?)",
> have been strengthened.

Look at http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page
the paragraph on Documentation, and,
in particular, the revision of the user manual.
I, too, feel the great need for the updated
manual. For this reason, I am trying to join
the effort to bring forward its revision
(to be done in my "spare time").
Writing good, complete documentation is hard!

Alan
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