[NTG-context] your favourite ConTeXt debugging tools

[NTG-context] your favourite ConTeXt debugging tools

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

There’s a growing number of trackers and directives, as well as \show… 
commands. I’m sure there are some that I could/should use and just don’t 
know, and there’s just too much to try.

Which are your hidden gems or favourite tools?

I’ll start:

\showlayout: inserts 4 pages of layout dimensions
\showmakeup: values of many details, e.g. distances and kerning
\showgrid: line grid for grid mode
\showframe: all frames
\showboxes: draw frames around a few areas
\showsetups: list of variables
\showbodyfont: variants of tha active font family
\showbodyfontenvironment: values of relative sizes
\showsymbolset[name]: list of symbols
\showstruts
\showcolor, \showcolorcomponents
\showpalet, \comparepalet
\showexternalfigures

\showtrackers – or "context --trackers"
\showdirectives – or "context --directives"


Trackers:
builders.hpack.overflow – mark under-/overfull hboxes
hyphenation.applied.visualize – show hyphenation
https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Trackers/typesetters.suspects
https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Trackers/visualizers.justification


Directives:
pdfview.method=auto (in contextcnf.lua) to change --autopdf default
logs.errors=* – make warnings errors(?)
logs.quitonerror=* – stop at every error
references.bookmarks.preroll – expand(?) macros in bookmarks
backend.pdf.nounicode=X – obfuscate text


Let’s fill in and complete
https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Trackers
(the list was made in 2012 and is quite outdated)

Hraban
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[NTG-context] Re: your favourite ConTeXt debugging tools

[Bruce Horrocks]

> On 12 Sep 2024, at 13:57, Henning Hraban Ramm <texml@fiee.net> wrote:
> 
> Which are your hidden gems or favourite tools?
[snip]

The most effective debugging tool for me is \starthiding ... \stophiding. (Not sure whether that says more about the feature or my Context writing skills!)

Maybe out of scope for this email thread but I’d like to see “Debugging” added as a category on the “Basics” wiki page and some of the things under “Further Reading” moved into it, because I think it would be helpful to newcomers to have debugging feature more prominently and the Basics page seems to be the right place for that.

There’s an incomplete page of the same name (<https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Debugging>). I feel that if it were completed it would become a huge long page that would be better split into several smaller pages - and the links to those smaller pages be placed on the revised Basics page.

Perhaps, your updated list of directives, Hraban, could also go there?
(There’s also <https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Visual_Debugging> which doesn’t overlap with what you’re doing but just serves to show that there is a lot of debugging information scattered about. It oo could also become a very long page and some thoughts on how to best structure it would be helpful.)

Does anyone have any objections, thoughts?

—
Bruce Horrocks
Hampshire, UK

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If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman3/lists/ntg-context.ntg.nl
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