Re: What do you miss in ConTeXt?

[Oliver Buerschaper <oliver.buerschaper@mpq.mpg.de>]

> Hi all,
> 
> ConTeXt has many features but sometimes there is something missing, what feature or package do you miss which is already available in another TeX system or unavailable in any TeX system?
> 
> Wolfgang


1. While TeX has been very strong at typesetting math traditionally its rivals are closing up and even surpassing TeX in this area partly. However, none of today's tools (including TeX) seem to be capable of laying out (2D) formulas fully automatically with the finest typographic results from their mathematical meaning alone. For example, in TeX I always find myself tweaking the spacing of glyphs or adjusting the size of brackets (among other things) once a formula becomes a little more involved. If TeX could make these decisions on its own it would help tremendously.

Of course, there's a limit to what extent visual aesthetics can be cast into algorithms ultimately but I do think that TeX can be improved significantly in this direction. I think what will help most is teaching TeX to not only think in terms of boxes but work with the actual glyph shapes.

For example, one could tackle the problem of delimiter sizes in the following way. First TeX needs to keep track of how deeply a given pair of delimiters is nested. This directly sets a certain minimal size if one wants nested brackets to increase in size towards the outside. Next TeX typesets all the material enclosed by the delimiters in question and inspects how the ink is actually spread out on paper. Based on knowledge about various features of the subformula's actual shape TeX can now make an informed decision about the surrounding delimiters. It is clear that for a visually pleasing result this decision will have to be different depending on whether the ink is, say, concentrated in one spot predominantly or smeared out over a long narrow band. So far TeX has only examined the total 
 height of this ink distribution which usually leads to excessively large delimiters. If one wants to quote a metaphor from optics TeX could analyze how much the ink distribution resembles an
  hourglass shaped light beam travelling back and forth between two facing round mirrors (i.e., the delimiters). One could then demand that the brackets' size is chosen such that a certain fraction of the enclosed ink is contained in the beam profile.

An approach based on glyph shapes could also help TeX to decide on how it places exponents. At the moment one has to decide manually whether an exponential is typeset as e^{\dots} or exp(\dots). Many more cases come to mind.

However, as far as I recall from conversations with Taco and others there are already some efforts underway to extend TeX's math skills :-)


2. I'd love to see better support for figures within formulas (in ConTeXt). I often use diagrammatic notation and find it difficult to align diagrams with the rest of the formula. For example, I'm missing a way to specify the math axis from within MetaPost code. That is, I'd like to mark an invisible point in the drawing which will later be aligned with the formula's math axis automatically.


3. I'd very much like to second Alan's suggestion to provide containers for text to flow in and out! Perhaps one could even go further and root ConTeXt entire page model in such an approach. After all, it's just text flowing in and out of pages together with fixed containers for headers and footers. This might also provide a consistent yet flexible foundation for all things columns.

While I'm at it (and because this is a wish list) having configurable page templates as in XSL-FO or Docscape would also be very nice :-)

Oliver
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