Re: Can this layout be done in Context

[David Rogers <davidandrewrogers@gmail.com>]

Russell Urquhart <russurquhart1@verizon.net> writes:

> On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 11:19:27PM -0700, David Rogers wrote:
>> To summarize: A page header with page number and guide word (the guide
>> word showing which chapter of which book of the Bible begins on this
>> page), two columns of regular text, "margin notes" *for both columns*
>> set in their own special single (very narrow) centre column, and
>> footnotes in one single large column, which is permitted to take a lot
>> of vertical space on the page when necessary, with all those areas of
>> the page separated from each other by thin ruled lines. Correct?
>
> I know that this example is probably a little extreme, but i love the
> layout of thise books, and while i may not want to be able to do
> something that has ALL of those layout attributes, i'd be curious as
> to what it would take on the Context side.


I don't think it's extreme - I just wanted to make sure we didn't miss
any of what it contains.

I think there would need to be a lot of typing inside of the Bible text
itself (for example, needing to manually tag each and every chapter of
each book of the Bible), to get the guide-words to display correctly -
you definitely wouldn't be able to just book-end the Bible with some
code at the beginning and end. I don't know how easy it is to get margin
notes from two different text columns to combine into one margin
column. The rest of it seems not very challenging from a ConTeXt point
of view - footnotes are quite well-supported (though again for both the
footnotes and the margin notes there would be considerable hand-work
adding the commands for every single note, to make them appear in the
right places); and the physical layout of the page is not difficult in
itself.

The benefit of all that typing, if done with the right kind of planning
in mind, would be that later you'd easily be able to change the page
size, amount of white space, fonts and font sizes, etc.

The disadvantage would be that you would no longer have the "clean,
plain" text of the Bible in your ConTeXt file; it would be permanently
littered with commands and switches, so it would be much harder to check
your textual accuracy. Therefore you would want to be quite sure you
have exactly the Bible version you want, with all the spelling corrected
and verses and paragraphs the way they ought to be and so on, before you
begin your ConTeXt adventure.

-- 
David R
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