Hi all,

I think for the sake of my sanity I am going to stop building prototypes now. I am very grateful to those who have been very helpful along the way, answering what must have seemed like foolish questions. I'd have to say that getting to grips with Context has taken longer than I bargained for, and has not been as smooth as I hoped. But without you, collectively, extreme frustration would have kicked in long ago.

I am based in the UK and have a moderate budget to develop some frameworks in which to publish a series of documents that'll be up for being maintained. This will be the third iteration for some of the collection, which have appeared on CD-ROM in a Macromedia shell, then as  rich pdfs with an InDesign - Acrobat Pro workflow.

Now, maybe, they'll find a final home in Context, at least for the pdf versions.

There are two pieces of work, I think, requiring different skill sets, I think.

1) To build some context templates, using modes and layers to give me the ability to produce pdfs of varying 'heft' by switching in and out layers. What people might read on a smartphone / iPad ought to be different to what they might get on a fast desktop / laptop running Acrobat, so permitting embedded swfs. The text is already highly structured and the trick will be to implement a document that automates much of what must be done by hand in InDesign, and to fully exploit the facilities in Context.

2) (This might be some heavy lifting, so may be best thought of separately). To build the wherewithal to allow rich swfs to be placed in the resulting pdfs by Context, at their natural size and at a specified location, and loading in poster frames and directories of assets where these exist (for which you currently have to use Acrobat Pro).

It is possible that I could, eventually manage the first, but I'd expect someone with a history of working on Context to do a much more elegant, clean and maintainable job. The second task is will need some cunning coding in Lua, or equivalent, I expect.

Anyone interested, please contact me off list, where we can discuss further details.

I am at:

Ian.Lawrence at Physics.org

Two notes:
Since the work is on behalf of the right kind of organisation, I'd anticipate putting the results of (2) back into the community - that's what we're doing with our other 'engine' (Flash) development.
It'll be easiest for my finance department if you are a consultant or business that can raise invoices.

kind regards

Ian