Asciidoc to PDF over Context

Asciidoc to PDF over Context

[Tobias Famulla]

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

Sincerely,

Tobias


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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
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___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: Asciidoc to PDF over Context

[luigi scarso]

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On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 10:18 PM, Tobias Famulla <uni@famulla.eu> 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?
> - Are there "not that hard" possibilites to write extentions to Context
> to do exactly that (maybe using Lua)?
> - 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)
>
> Context alredy has a kind of xslt processor written in lpeg and embedded
into the format.
--- see  for example http://wiki.contextgarden.net/XML
The DocBook is a huge specification, so
I guess that a convert for ConTeXt takes a huge amount of work if you want
to map everything --- but it is feasible if you plan to start with a small
subset.
From this point of view, Docbook already has a xslt to latex,
so  working on a xslt to context maybe makes more sense, if one accepts
that context is still evolving.


-- 
luigi

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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
___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: Asciidoc to PDF over Context

[Hans Hagen]

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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___________________________________________________________________________________
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
___________________________________________________________________________________

Re: Asciidoc to PDF over Context

[Jan Tosovsky]

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On 2015-02-13 luigi scarso wrote:
> On 2015-02-12 Tobias Famulla <uni@famulla.eu> wrote:
> >
> > Context could be the right processor to create beautiful
> > PDFs out of intermediate formats (DocBook 5 or Asciidoc).
> 
> The DocBook is a huge specification, so I guess that a convert 
> for ConTeXt takes a huge amount of work if you want to map 
> everything --- but it is feasible if you plan to start with
> a small subset.
>
> From this point of view, Docbook already has a xslt to latex

DocBook has even ConTeXt output
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dblatex/files/dbcontext/

Actually it produces quite obsolete syntax, but it is a good starting point
for further tweaking. Exactly this I did in my recent project.

While my resources are very limited, if any effort in this field will start,
I can share my DocBook/XSLT experience. It could also be a nice GSoC project
for students:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/201501/msg00027.html

Btw, I prefer DocBook over lightweight markup languages (Markdown, Asciidoc)
as latter lack semantics and advanced structuring, which may be limiting in
some projects requiring advanced formatting.

Jan

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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
___________________________________________________________________________________