Re: [OT] Research into Generative Typesetting

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 6:30 AM, John Haltiwanger
<john.haltiwanger@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Christian <metan0r@gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > [^1]: If anyone is interested, I'm thinking I might make a module that
>> > sets up
>> > the environment according to these conventions.
>>
>>
>> I like the idea of pre-made styles. I'm not shure if a module would
>> provide the necessary flexibility, though. Maybe a style collection (with
>> commented code and linked sample output PDFs) in the wiki would do the job.
>> Like there is for the biochemistry textbook. From there users could just use
>> it as a whole or adapt it to their needs.
>>
>
> That is certainly one approach. Hoewever, I'd like to make it as easy as
> possible for people who just want to use defaults to do so. One solution is
> to have a script that generates a scaffold environment inside a Context
> source file. Then they do not need to keep multiple templates around or have
> internet access when creating a document. (I know that for experienced
> Context users, having some .env files or source templates around is no
> problem, but I'm thinking of users who are less experienced or just want to
> typeset Markdown documents without messing with TeX).
>
> ./context-style-gen.rb --style=bringhurst --input=myThesis.markdown
> myThesis.tex

Note: The following is untested.

You don't need another script, context can handle this natively.  For
example, you can write a 'process-markdown' module that directly
processes a markdown file: (I haven't looked at the new markdown
module. I am assuming that it provides a macro, \inputmarkdown{...} to
process a markdown file.

\startmodule[process-markdown]

\starttext
\inputmarkdown{\inputfilename}
\stoptext

\stopmodule

Then, you can call ConTeXt using

context --usemodules=tufte,other-style,process-markdown
--result=whatever file.markdown

I followed a similar approach when I was processing markdown files
using the filter module. See

http://randomdeterminism.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/markdowntopdf/

I used modes instead of a separate module and an evinronment instead
of a module because that fit my workflow better.

@Hans: do you think that it is a good idea to include something like
this in the m-markdown module so that a user could say

context --usemodule=markdown --mode=process file.markdown

and get a pdf output.

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

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________