Re: Can this layout be done in Context

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 7/23/2013 9:47 PM, David Rogers wrote:
> Russell Urquhart <russurquhart1@verizon.net> writes:
>
>> On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 11:19:27PM -0700, David Rogers wrote:
>>> To summarize: A page header with page number and guide word (the guide
>>> word showing which chapter of which book of the Bible begins on this
>>> page), two columns of regular text, "margin notes" *for both columns*
>>> set in their own special single (very narrow) centre column, and
>>> footnotes in one single large column, which is permitted to take a lot
>>> of vertical space on the page when necessary, with all those areas of
>>> the page separated from each other by thin ruled lines. Correct?
>>
>> I know that this example is probably a little extreme, but i love the
>> layout of thise books, and while i may not want to be able to do
>> something that has ALL of those layout attributes, i'd be curious as
>> to what it would take on the Context side.
>
>
> I don't think it's extreme - I just wanted to make sure we didn't miss
> any of what it contains.
>
> I think there would need to be a lot of typing inside of the Bible text
> itself (for example, needing to manually tag each and every chapter of
> each book of the Bible), to get the guide-words to display correctly -
> you definitely wouldn't be able to just book-end the Bible with some
> code at the beginning and end. I don't know how easy it is to get margin
> notes from two different text columns to combine into one margin
> column. The rest of it seems not very challenging from a ConTeXt point
> of view - footnotes are quite well-supported (though again for both the
> footnotes and the margin notes there would be considerable hand-work
> adding the commands for every single note, to make them appear in the
> right places); and the physical layout of the page is not difficult in
> itself.

critical editions is one area where extensions can be expected in context

> The benefit of all that typing, if done with the right kind of planning
> in mind, would be that later you'd easily be able to change the page
> size, amount of white space, fonts and font sizes, etc.
>
> The disadvantage would be that you would no longer have the "clean,
> plain" text of the Bible in your ConTeXt file; it would be permanently
> littered with commands and switches, so it would be much harder to check
> your textual accuracy. Therefore you would want to be quite sure you
> have exactly the Bible version you want, with all the spelling corrected
> and verses and paragraphs the way they ought to be and so on, before you
> begin your ConTeXt adventure.

as long as you use enough structure it's ok and you can write checkers 
(often xml is a good choice too)

Hans

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