Re: ConTeXt on the Mac (TexShop). Problem of a newbie

["Meigen, Thomas" <T.Meigen@augenklinik.uni-wuerzburg.de>]

Hi Keith,

thank you for your  open comments. You exactly understood the questions
that I am asking right now. Would it be a good idea to switch to ConTeXt?

Yes, I do not have (and I do not want to have) a deeper understanding of 
proper TeX. Well, I have Knuth's TeXbook in my shelf, but it is simply
a question of time. Life is too short anyway ;-)

But... do I really have to have a knowledge of proper TeX and Lua before
I can use ConTeXt? For me, the charme of ConTeXt had always been that
those nice documents had been prepared with rather smart code.
I dont want to write my own modules (in which case I definitely would 
need to know proper TeX and Lua). I just want to use ConTeXt and
focus on the content, not on the technical background. 

Sure, I am using MacTeX and TeXLive now for many years. 

What attracted me to ConTeXt was the project-product-component 
structure to use and re-use components. Other aspects are

- different modes (presentation, handout, manuscript)

- poster production

- nice graphics/animation via pstricks or metapost

- export to other formats (when writing articles many journals in my
field do not accept .tex-files)

- export to epub/mobi format. I enjoy reading mobile versions of
my own texts and of the texts my students give me for review. 

- import from Scrivener... When writing difficult texts I noticed that
LaTeX-typesetting is often an interruption of the writing flow. After writing
some sentences I am curious to see how the text might look like, so
I typeset the text and sooner or later I am fiddling with some LaTeX 
details instead of focussing on the writing process. One help had been
to use Scrivener during the writing process and using the LaTeX 
typesetting for the final steps only (as a reward... ;-) ).

How much of this list can be accomplished with LuaTex and ConTeXt...?


Best wishes
Thomas
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