Re: Asciidoc to PDF over Context

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 2/12/2015 10:18 PM, Tobias Famulla wrote:
> Hello Mailing-List,
>
> I used Latex for a few years in university to create reports for
> assignments and also to write my bachelor thesis (I would have liked to
> use Context, but the right schema for citation was not available and I
> had no time to create it myself).
> Over the time I got a little bit frustrated with Latex, because it has
> many modules and most of the time gets the job done, but writing Latex
> can sometimes be quite hard sometime to me (you have to have the modules
> installed, tweak around with charactersets, imagepositioning, ...).
>
> In between I looked at much smaller and sleaker document representations
> languages (asciidoc, restructuredText, Markdown) and writing in it is a
> pleasure compared to Latex (I haven't really tried out Context but
> looked over the documentation and it looked more promising but shares
> the same design ideas).
> Asciidoc is even able to declarate source code listings and formulas.
> Never the less, the output to Pdf is not always the nicest one.
>
> The reason why I now write to this list, is, that I imagine, that
> Context could be the right processor to create beautiful PDFs out of
> intermediate formats (DocBook 5 or Asciidoc). For the conversion to
> Latex a module for asciidoctor (ruby implementation) is in developement.
> The ideal system I imagine would be close to what is used with HTML and
> CSS on the web: Having a easy to use file format to writing you
> documents (Asciidoc or DocBook as intermediate format) and a system to
> create the PDFs (maybe Context and a Context-Template)
>
> So my main questions are:
> - Are there straigt forward ways to create PDFs with Context using
> Docbook 5?

it's not too hard to implement but so far i never ran into docbook files 
(so it's mostly lack of momentum / motivation / reason)

> - Are there "not that hard" possibilites to write extentions to Context
> to do exactly that (maybe using Lua)?

docbook is just xml and as we process quite complex ml here i guess it 
should be doable within the current functionality

> - Does it make more sense, when using another input format like
> Asciidoc, to write a converter which directly creates a
> Context-document? (although it might be more versatile to use DocBook
> for other formats like Markdown or DocBook itself)

it depends on your documents ... as soon as you need more structure, 
more control over how it has to look typeset, the advantage of light 
coding quickly disappears; and even if there are escapes the coding then 
looks pretty bad compared to a clean tex (or xml) source

(these ascii based codings remind me of university times long ago, when 
i wrote some basic formatting / pagination code using simple directives 
so that we could handle our thesis on those terminals ... i must have 
the (pascal) source someplace ... a couple of years later I found out 
that on those vax machines there could have been tex running)

> Sincerely,
>
> Tobias
>
>
>
> ___________________________________________________________________________________
> 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
> ___________________________________________________________________________________
>


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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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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
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