Re: migrating to ConTeXt

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Dec 22, 2007 11:01 AM, Gour wrote:

> My writing needs are from short & simple docs (1--few pages long) over preparing
> educational presentations (with handouts) illustrated with graphics (both images & SVG) for
> seminars (beamer-like) to be used with video-projector in classroom-like environments upt to
> the  full size books by using Croatian & English languages and Sanskrit diacritics (not Devanagari
> at the moment :-)
>
> So I'm interested whether:
>
> 1) ConTeXt can support all the above requirements?

Yes, except that there is no beamer package available in ConTeXt , but
theoretically "anything can be done".

In addition to the core functionality:
http://modules.contextgarden.net/taspresent
http://modules.contextgarden.net/t-rsteps

> (In the past there were issues with some Croatian chars - iirc - đ & Đ and some utf-8 problems in
> general.)

2.56$ for the first buggy đ found in ConTeXt :-)
(We'll drop that letter from our keyboards soon :)

That was before anyone started complaining about its non-functionality :).

Now, unless fonts are problematic, it should work flawlessly. (not
with texfont, since it uses ec.enc which is broken, but texfont is now
a history anyway)

Which general utf-8 problems? There might be some issues every now and
then (in pdfTeX each character has to be defined separately and in
LuaTeX there might be some new unpolished/non-debugged features), but
they're usually resolved once someone complains. Exotic scripts don't
work in pdfTeX of course.

> 2) If I start with XeTeX engine, will those documents will be compatible with Mark IV?

You can always write incompatible code (by using XeTeX primitives),
but in general you should be able to process XeTeX (ConTeXt) documents
with LuaTeX without any problem (the only warning sign is that font
definitions might still change a bit, but that only means changing a
few top lines in your style file). The reverse is not neccessary true
since you cannot use Lua in XeTeX.

> 3) can one run luaTeX on x86_64 (I use Arch Linux & texlive) ?

Sure.

> 4) how good is ConTeXt support in AUCTeX and what is the prospect to get preview-ConTeXt?

AUCTeX is LaTeX oriented I guess, but I don't knom the details.

> 5) I read LaTeX in proper ConTeXt pdf, but I'm interested is there some helper to convert classical
> LaTeX book (book class) to ConTeXt? I've two books which I'm considering to publish as one (~1000p)
> in the future, so any help in conversion would be nice.

It always depends on source, so creating a general converter is
impossible. I would run "search and replace" a few times (depending on
source), but that cannot solve everything.

Mojca
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