Margin terminology -- badly documented, undocumented, or misdocumented

[James Fisher <jameshfisher@gmail.com>]

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Hi all.


I am trying to understand the terminology for the \definelayout and
\setuplayout commands.
Unfortunately the documentation at
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Layoutdoesn't correspond to the actual
output I get.
Nor does the 'documentation' at http://getfo.org/context_xml/page3.html ,
which the first page recommends.
More, the two pages seem pretty contradictory.

Consider my situation: I'm trying to set up an A4 page with the following
margins (I use the term margin to mean the space from the edge of the
physical paper to the edge of the body text area):

top: 2.97cm
bottom: 2.97cm
left: 2.1cm
right: 2.1cm

For the moment, I don't care at all about header and footer space, nor notes
in the margins; I'm just trying to get the above margins.
However, with all conceivable combinations of commands at both of those
pages, I've been unable to set anything like this up.

Based on the getfo.org page, I should be able to set up these left and right
margins with:

backspace=2.1cm,
cutspace=2.1cm

But, looking at the result, and also with using \showlayout (which for some
reason, AFAICS, generates four identical pages at the beginning of the
document), this quite obviously doesn't do what getfo.org claims.

I have also tried setting everything to 0cm with the exception of any random
one of the measurements that go into making a margin, which I would set to
2.1cm.  No avail here, either.

Can someone give me the configuration I would need for the above required
margins?  Even better, can someone give me the definitive definitions of all
the terms used in http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Layout, algebraically rather
than as ambiguous tables of "Remarks"?  This would help a bunch.


Many thanks,


James Fisher

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