ConTeXt as a service

ConTeXt as a service

[Brian Ballsun-Stanton]

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In reply to: https://mailman.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2019/096313.html

I personally run ConTeXt as a service (as a sort of do-it-yourself
Overleaf).

I use floobits (https://floobits.com/Denubis) as an intermediary code
server, and their floomatic sevice(https://floobits.com/help/floomatic)
running  on a server I have. That then calls a shell script that invokes
ConTeXt, which writes logs and pdfs to an nginx monitored folder. It's been
running for about 4 years now and has been solid enough for me to use
without thinking too much about.

Happy to share code and details. My deployment is super-hacky, but it works?

-Brian

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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Hans Hagen]

On 11/23/2019 1:18 PM, luigi scarso wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 1:02 PM Henning Hraban Ramm <texml@fiee.net 
> <mailto:texml@fiee.net>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     Don’t exaggerate. Or maybe your company didn’t think about which
>     tags are really necessary.
>     A proper configuration that doesn’t allow nonsense, even if users
>     paste text from Word documents, is not such a big effort.
> 
>     I can’t remember which JS editor I used >10 years ago for the
>     editorial system of a city magazine, but I remember I only allowed a
>     few tags (authors weren’t allowed to use font and color settings)
>     and also run a HTML cleaner before saving. It was an effort until it
>     worked, but not that much.
> 
> 
> another link:
> https://coko.foundation/
> https://coko.foundation/product-suite/
Sounde nice but then tne question is: which of these will stay for a 
long term (commitment, open etc). Always a bit of a ganmble.

Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Hans Hagen]

On 11/23/2019 5:03 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

> But that’s structured input; I thought we were talking about HTML editors.
> HTML is only well structured (in a general sense, not XML) if you write it this way manually or if you severely limit the user of an editor.

Long ago I decided that, unless i got a project that demands it, i don't 
spend much time on it (also because in practice we can convince people 
to edit the xml directly and hit a button in the editor to get a pdf) 
... html, everything javascript, the web, all that is too much tight 
into rapid changem instability, often expensive projects and i am a bit 
allergic for making stuff that is used only once and ditched after a 
year (or less)

  Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Hans Hagen]

On 11/23/2019 4:39 PM, mf wrote:

> The problems arise when you need to move data to and from the container.
> Docker lets you share a local filesystem path with the container, but 
> that's not possible on a network (with the same performance of a local 
> filesystem, i mean).

Just curious: what is the bottleneck there? When we run context as a 
'service' we always do that on an nfs mount (even the tex tree).

Hans   -----------------------------------------------------------------
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Am 2019-11-23 um 16:50 schrieb Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>:
> 
> On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 16:40, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
>>> Am 2019-11-23 um 15:14 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
>>> On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 13:02, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
>>>>> Am 2019-11-23 um 08:12 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Then you can use one of the online JS editors like CKeditor.\
>>>>> 
>>>>> Only if you spend an enormous amount of effort making sure that the
>>>>> code is properly cleaned up rather than containing a gazillion random
>>>>> html style tags which you can never reconstruct back into some
>>>>> structured form.
>>>> 
>>>> Don’t exaggerate. Or maybe your company didn’t think about which tags are really necessary.
>>>> A proper configuration that doesn’t allow nonsense, even if users paste text from Word documents, is not such a big effort.
>>> 
>>> I'm not exaggerating, I would gladly be convinced/proved that I'm
>>> wrong. How much effort (expressed in hours or days) do you think is
>>> needed to implement the following?
>> 
>> Oh, IMO that wishlist is very demanding. I’d say it’s more or less impossible with any HTML editor.
> 
> So where do we stand with "you are exaggerating, it's really simple",
> then? How many hours to configure it? ;)

I was thinking about text (articles, literature), you were thinking about complex material. The first is simple, the latter is, well, at least complex.

> (ConTeXt has no problems doing all that, and asciidoc as potential
> input format supports all the required features as well;

But that’s structured input; I thought we were talking about HTML editors.
HTML is only well structured (in a general sense, not XML) if you write it this way manually or if you severely limit the user of an editor.

> if a nice
> translation layer is defined, one can get both awesome html out of the
> box as well as high quality PDF. I'm just saying that I find MCE
> somewhat useless. Whether or not that's exaggerating ... still waiting
> to be proven wrong.)

MCE is a known example, but probably not the best for every purpose. Also a matter of taste...

>> The JS editors I know of allow for custom menus, and it should be easy to setup special divs for these warning sections.
>> I don’t know any good table or formula editors/plugins, though. I’m not up to date, but I guess with a graphical/“WYSIWYG” tool you’ll never get perfectly structured input and will never be able to address finer details of typography, esp. WRT math.
> 
> Well ... both Word and Open/LibreOffice do a pretty decent job w.r.t
> math nowadays, MathJax is awesome, and I've also seen some awesome
> javascript apps allowing you to edit equations. So it's not
> impossible. Just not that straightforward …

Since I seldom need formulae, I got no experience with those. Last time I had to use Word’s formula editor it was horrible, but that was in 2005 or so, and Microsoft did their homework since.
I guess it’s still easier to write TeX code than clicking formulae together.

> I'm not saying that I really need a WYSIWYG editor. Anyone who's
> supposed to enter correct complex formulas should be able to learn
> some basic markup language (I guess).

I agree.

Best, Hraban

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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 16:40, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
> > Am 2019-11-23 um 15:14 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
> > On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 13:02, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
> >>> Am 2019-11-23 um 08:12 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
> >>>>
> >>>> Then you can use one of the online JS editors like CKeditor.\
> >>>
> >>> Only if you spend an enormous amount of effort making sure that the
> >>> code is properly cleaned up rather than containing a gazillion random
> >>> html style tags which you can never reconstruct back into some
> >>> structured form.
> >>>
> >>> (And yes, my impression is that Massi spent a huge amount of effort in
> >>> configuring the editor and cleaning up the mess. My company didn't and
> >>> ended up with sometimes literally every word in a sentence using a
> >>> different font size or style. They gave up on html + cke pretty soon,
> >>> but couldn't be convinced that this was a bad idea upfront.)
> >>
> >> Don’t exaggerate. Or maybe your company didn’t think about which tags are really necessary.
> >> A proper configuration that doesn’t allow nonsense, even if users paste text from Word documents, is not such a big effort.
> >
> > I'm not exaggerating, I would gladly be convinced/proved that I'm
> > wrong. How much effort (expressed in hours or days) do you think is
> > needed to implement the following?
>
> Oh, IMO that wishlist is very demanding. I’d say it’s more or less impossible with any HTML editor.

So where do we stand with "you are exaggerating, it's really simple",
then? How many hours to configure it? ;)

(ConTeXt has no problems doing all that, and asciidoc as potential
input format supports all the required features as well; if a nice
translation layer is defined, one can get both awesome html out of the
box as well as high quality PDF. I'm just saying that I find MCE
somewhat useless. Whether or not that's exaggerating ... still waiting
to be proven wrong.)

> The JS editors I know of allow for custom menus, and it should be easy to setup special divs for these warning sections.
> I don’t know any good table or formula editors/plugins, though. I’m not up to date, but I guess with a graphical/“WYSIWYG” tool you’ll never get perfectly structured input and will never be able to address finer details of typography, esp. WRT math.

Well ... both Word and Open/LibreOffice do a pretty decent job w.r.t
math nowadays, MathJax is awesome, and I've also seen some awesome
javascript apps allowing you to edit equations. So it's not
impossible. Just not that straightforward ...

I'm not saying that I really need a WYSIWYG editor. Anyone who's
supposed to enter correct complex formulas should be able to learn
some basic markup language (I guess).

Mojca
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

> Am 2019-11-23 um 15:14 schrieb Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>:
> 
> On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 13:02, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
>>> Am 2019-11-23 um 08:12 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
>>>> 
>>>> Then you can use one of the online JS editors like CKeditor.\
>>> 
>>> Only if you spend an enormous amount of effort making sure that the
>>> code is properly cleaned up rather than containing a gazillion random
>>> html style tags which you can never reconstruct back into some
>>> structured form.
>>> 
>>> (And yes, my impression is that Massi spent a huge amount of effort in
>>> configuring the editor and cleaning up the mess. My company didn't and
>>> ended up with sometimes literally every word in a sentence using a
>>> different font size or style. They gave up on html + cke pretty soon,
>>> but couldn't be convinced that this was a bad idea upfront.)
>> 
>> Don’t exaggerate. Or maybe your company didn’t think about which tags are really necessary.
>> A proper configuration that doesn’t allow nonsense, even if users paste text from Word documents, is not such a big effort.
> 
> I'm not exaggerating, I would gladly be convinced/proved that I'm
> wrong. How much effort (expressed in hours or days) do you think is
> needed to implement the following?
> (Any existing opensource solution may be used as the basis.)
> 
> My wishlist is not that demanding:
> * allow generating both printable documents on white background, as
> well as black slides with mostly white text (PDF as well as browsable
> HTML website)
> * support advanced mathematical formulas
> * some sections or words do need to have some special markings (for
> example apply some colours or bold/italic; the colour of course needs
> to depend on background colour)
> * tables need to be styled according to white the designer specifies,
> but it should be very easy to change the table style after some months
> * support consistently styled "CAUTION: ..., WARNING: ..., NOTE: ..."
> sections inside the text (make it trivial to change the style of how
> these are printed out after some months)
> * support table of contents, nice front page etc.
> * support vector images for PDFs

Oh, IMO that wishlist is very demanding. I’d say it’s more or less impossible with any HTML editor.

My demands were much less and well controllable:
- no math, no tables
- no images (they were handled differently and attached to the articles)
- only simple markup (bold or italics)
- not even headings (we used single editor instances for every paragraph with single text fields for section headings)
- I added a few special tags, but in the end we hardly ever needed them.

We had different preconfigured types of articles with length and section limits, also dependend on rubric.
The workflow was not automatical: output was InDesign tagged text, i.e. preformatted text that the layouters put together in InDesign, also only working with the right InDesign templates that contained the styles that the articles addressed.
Pictures came in FTP folders with named references to the articles. My client program collected articles from the web application, ads and pictures from the FTP server, preprocessed the ads and images and could also prepare InDesign docs, if they didn’t exist (using AppleScript to control InDesign).
We used single ID documents for every rubric (that way several people could work on one issue) and combined them as a "book" in the end. The ToC was partly automatic (rubrics and page numbers), but manually adapted (layout, pictures etc.).

The whole thing started with the automation of the event calendar – when I took over, they used a single user FileMaker database that got exported with a limited (demo?) version of a plugin; all the formatting was done manually. My colleagues at the printshop needed several days of work for that alone. I made a simple web app (database frontend), and used InDesign’s XML import – importing the calendar needed about an hour, but then it was perfectly formatted, including some icons. On the editors’ side, it was a big time saver that they could copy existing events and there was a simple location/host management. Then the publishers asked if they couldn’t use the same system also for their articles…

When I started my second attempt at the system (replacing PHP and proprietary libraries with a JS/Webix frontend and a Python/Django backend), I was planning to use one editor for whole articles and probably would have run into some of your problems, but the customer didn’t like to spend money and was using my old system for several more years, until the magazine was bought by a bigger publisher…
I was also planning for different backends, i.e. IDML, ConTeXt, LaTeX or any XML output. But I’m always planning a lot.

Sorry for pratting, got nostalgic.

The JS editors I know of allow for custom menus, and it should be easy to setup special divs for these warning sections.
I don’t know any good table or formula editors/plugins, though. I’m not up to date, but I guess with a graphical/“WYSIWYG” tool you’ll never get perfectly structured input and will never be able to address finer details of typography, esp. WRT math.
(Remember what Hans told us about Pragma’s ASCIImath workflow.)

Also, what Massi said. He has more extensive and more current experience than me.

Best, Hraban


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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[mf]

Il 22/11/19 08:43, Jan U. Hasecke ha scritto:
> Am 20.11.19 um 18:10 schrieb Henning Hraban Ramm:
>> Hi!
>>
>> I’m running ConTeXt on my web server e.g. to generate shipping forms for a customer.
>>
>> As Hans said, it makes sense to use an asynchronous setup; in my case it’s celery/RabbitMQ behind Django.
>>
>> You probably need to set a few environment variables: I find HOME, PATH, TEXROOT and TEXMFOS in my setup. I don’t know if you really need all of them, it’s already running for several years…
>> Also your web server process might only run binaries that belong to some user/group like wwwrun.
>>
>> It won’t work in shared hosting, because you can’t install your own programs.
> 
> Generally this is correct. But there are providers such as the
> Hostsharing cooperative where it is possible to install programs in a
> shared hosting environment. We do it for years. ;-)
> 
>> Otherwise: What kind of documentation do you need? Installing ConTeXt on a (web) server is not different from any other Linux system. Calling ConTeXt from a web application is not different from calling any other external program. The rest depends on your setup and web frameworks.
> 
> I am very interested in running ConTeXt as a service, too. I am still
> nurturing the idea of a publishing cooperative for self publishers with
> a Markdown --> Pandoc --> ConTeXt workflow with a nice web frontend. I
> hope to make it to the next ConTeXt meeting to discuss it.
> 

I'm using ConTeXt inside a Docker container.
The same container runs a Node+Express.js interface to accept documents 
and provide resulting PDFs, as well as job information while ConTeXt is 
typesetting a document.

That way i get:

- container isolation: i can have different ConTeXt versions between the 
container and the host (the same goes for other software)

- thanks to the Node+Express, a client-server workflow over a network

The problems arise when you need to move data to and from the container.
Docker lets you share a local filesystem path with the container, but 
that's not possible on a network (with the same performance of a local 
filesystem, i mean).

Maybe your sources are not too heavy, but your ConTeXt environments, 
graphics, fonts are probably heavier. So are PDFs produced by ConTeXt.

That's why i'm using a docker container image that preloads all the 
configuration files (.tex and .lua), graphics, fonts during image building.

It's not a generic, all-purpose ConTeXt container, it's tailored on a 
very specific kind of documents. That way the only things i'm moving 
around are XHTML sources and typeset PDFs.

Things get really complex if you want to use containers to scale up, 
having a whole battery of identical ConTeXt servers distributed in a cloud.
It's not my case, i have only one container in one physical server, 
reachable from many network clients.

Stateless containers are indistinguishable, but ConTeXt containers hold 
state: your documents and all the data that is needed to typeset them.

When you ask for a resulting PDF, only one specific container can answer 
you, unless that PDF has been put on a shared storage. But that could 
mean moving it over a network, adding latency and burden on the network.

Suppose you slightly modify your document and want to typeset it again.
Reusing the .tuc file of the previous version could save you some runs, 
but only the previous container knows about the .tuc file.
So pick one: run ConTeXt on the same container or move the .tuc file 
over the network to another one.

It's the general problem of managing state with containers.

Another question: previewing the result of typesetting.
When the PDF is in your directory, you can see it as soon as ConTeXt 
finishes a run.
I keep evince open on a file while i'm running ConTeXt locally.

When ConTeXt is working on a server, in the simplest setup you must wait 
until it finishes all the runs before you can download the PDF. That's 
the way i started.

Now i take a local copy of the PDF inside the container, every time a 
single run ends; that way you can download the PDF just after the first 
run. But it also means downloading your PDF n times, where n is the 
number of runs.

That's why i'm leveraging the Node+Express interface to provide a 
single-page preview: a rendering of a page at screen resolution, 
produced inside the container with pdftocairo; the image is also cached, 
so that it's updated only when a new PDF - from a new run - is ready.

Instead of downloading the PDF n times, i get a light and early preview 
of single pages. And the interface lets you download the whole PDF once 
it's done.

Massi
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[mf]

Il 23/11/19 13:02, Henning Hraban Ramm ha scritto:
> 
>> Am 2019-11-23 um 08:12 schrieb Mojca Miklavec
>> <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>:
>>> 
>>> Then you can use one of the online JS editors like CKeditor.\
>> 
>> Only if you spend an enormous amount of effort making sure that
>> the code is properly cleaned up rather than containing a gazillion
>> random html style tags which you can never reconstruct back into
>> some structured form.
>> 
>> (And yes, my impression is that Massi spent a huge amount of effort
>> in configuring the editor and cleaning up the mess. My company
>> didn't and ended up with sometimes literally every word in a
>> sentence using a different font size or style. They gave up on html
>> + cke pretty soon, but couldn't be convinced that this was a bad
>> idea upfront.)

Indeed, an ongoing effort.
Markup should be mostly semantic, leaving the most of styling to ConTeXt
or CSS or whatever.
But then you must consider the features and limitations of the tools you
use.

CKEditor lets you define rules to specify what can enter your sources;
it's great, but it's essentially a HTML editor, not a semantic editor.
In CKE, the HTML is *the* document, not a representation of it inside a 
browser.

Prosemirror is the best editor i know, if you care about complete
control of what goes into your sources.
It's document agnostic, HTML is used only to represent the document in a 
browser. Your document could be JSON or markdown or whatever.

Prosemirror is actually an editor kit, not an editor:

- Tiptap editor combines Prosemirror with Vue.js

- wax-prosemirror instead combines Prosemirror with React.js

I'm developing on top of wax-prosemirror, which should be the next
version of the editor inside Editoria by Coko Foundation (Luigi posted a
couple of links in another reply of this thread).

Jure Triglav of Coko Foundation wrote a good post on open source 
collaborative editors:
https://juretriglav.si/open-source-collaborative-text-editors/

> Don’t exaggerate. Or maybe your company didn’t think about which tags
> are really necessary. A proper configuration that doesn’t allow
> nonsense, even if users paste text from Word documents, is not such a
> big effort.

Even though we started with a semantic tagging mindset, we always find
alien tags or wrong combinations of allowed tags in our sources.
It's not only pasting from Word or a web page, sometimes it's browsers'
plugins or different behaviors among different browsers. And bugs of my
code, of course.

I feel it's hard to exaggerate in paying attention to that, there's 
always something unwanted sneaking in.

> I can’t remember which JS editor I used >10 years ago for the
> editorial system of a city magazine, but I remember I only allowed a
> few tags (authors weren’t allowed to use font and color settings) and
> also run a HTML cleaner before saving. It was an effort until it
> worked, but not that much.
> 

We have filters to clean up a source before editing, rules inside a
CKE-based editor and filters to do other cleanups while saving.
We have quite a good control over sources, yet it's not complete.

A lot depends on the complexity of your documents: you start
simple and do some assumptions; later you want to increase complexity,
add new features that must combine with the legacy of every assumption
you did in the past.
More complex documents, more room for unwanted markup to enter them.

I admire Pandoc's document model: it's simple enough, well specified,
with generic tags (Div for blocks and Span for inlines) that carry
information with classes and key-value data, RawInlines and RawBlocks to 
inject low level tagging for specific formats.
Generics and Raw objects let you represent and convert many elements 
that are not built in.

Massi
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 13:02, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
> > Am 2019-11-23 um 08:12 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
> >>
> >> Then you can use one of the online JS editors like CKeditor.\
> >
> > Only if you spend an enormous amount of effort making sure that the
> > code is properly cleaned up rather than containing a gazillion random
> > html style tags which you can never reconstruct back into some
> > structured form.
> >
> > (And yes, my impression is that Massi spent a huge amount of effort in
> > configuring the editor and cleaning up the mess. My company didn't and
> > ended up with sometimes literally every word in a sentence using a
> > different font size or style. They gave up on html + cke pretty soon,
> > but couldn't be convinced that this was a bad idea upfront.)
>
> Don’t exaggerate. Or maybe your company didn’t think about which tags are really necessary.
> A proper configuration that doesn’t allow nonsense, even if users paste text from Word documents, is not such a big effort.

I'm not exaggerating, I would gladly be convinced/proved that I'm
wrong. How much effort (expressed in hours or days) do you think is
needed to implement the following?
(Any existing opensource solution may be used as the basis.)

My wishlist is not that demanding:
* allow generating both printable documents on white background, as
well as black slides with mostly white text (PDF as well as browsable
HTML website)
* support advanced mathematical formulas
* some sections or words do need to have some special markings (for
example apply some colours or bold/italic; the colour of course needs
to depend on background colour)
* tables need to be styled according to white the designer specifies,
but it should be very easy to change the table style after some months
* support consistently styled "CAUTION: ..., WARNING: ..., NOTE: ..."
sections inside the text (make it trivial to change the style of how
these are printed out after some months)
* support table of contents, nice front page etc.
* support vector images for PDFs

Mojca
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[mf]

Il 23/11/19 14:18, Henning Hraban Ramm ha scritto:
> 
>> Am 2019-11-23 um 13:18 schrieb luigi scarso <luigi.scarso@gmail.com>:
>> another link:
>> https://coko.foundation/
>> https://coko.foundation/product-suite/
> 
> or merely https://pubsweet.coko.foundation
> 
> Thank you for the hint, sounds interesting and like the thing I always wanted to build…
> I didn’t read everything, but I didn’t find any hints how (if?) they produce PDFs or other output formats.
> 
They use a javascript library, paged.js, it's HTML + standard CSS to PDF.

Massi
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

> Am 2019-11-23 um 13:18 schrieb luigi scarso <luigi.scarso@gmail.com>:
> another link:
> https://coko.foundation/
> https://coko.foundation/product-suite/

or merely https://pubsweet.coko.foundation

Thank you for the hint, sounds interesting and like the thing I always wanted to build…
I didn’t read everything, but I didn’t find any hints how (if?) they produce PDFs or other output formats.


Greetlings, Hraban

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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[luigi scarso]

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On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 1:02 PM Henning Hraban Ramm <texml@fiee.net> wrote:

>
> Don’t exaggerate. Or maybe your company didn’t think about which tags are
> really necessary.
> A proper configuration that doesn’t allow nonsense, even if users paste
> text from Word documents, is not such a big effort.
>
> I can’t remember which JS editor I used >10 years ago for the editorial
> system of a city magazine, but I remember I only allowed a few tags
> (authors weren’t allowed to use font and color settings) and also run a
> HTML cleaner before saving. It was an effort until it worked, but not that
> much.
>

another link:
https://coko.foundation/
https://coko.foundation/product-suite/

-- 
luigi

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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

> Am 2019-11-23 um 08:12 schrieb Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>:
>> 
>> Then you can use one of the online JS editors like CKeditor.\
> 
> Only if you spend an enormous amount of effort making sure that the
> code is properly cleaned up rather than containing a gazillion random
> html style tags which you can never reconstruct back into some
> structured form.
> 
> (And yes, my impression is that Massi spent a huge amount of effort in
> configuring the editor and cleaning up the mess. My company didn't and
> ended up with sometimes literally every word in a sentence using a
> different font size or style. They gave up on html + cke pretty soon,
> but couldn't be convinced that this was a bad idea upfront.)

Don’t exaggerate. Or maybe your company didn’t think about which tags are really necessary.
A proper configuration that doesn’t allow nonsense, even if users paste text from Word documents, is not such a big effort.

I can’t remember which JS editor I used >10 years ago for the editorial system of a city magazine, but I remember I only allowed a few tags (authors weren’t allowed to use font and color settings) and also run a HTML cleaner before saving. It was an effort until it worked, but not that much.

Greetlings, Hraban
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 at 10:05, Henning Hraban Ramm <texml@fiee.net> wrote:
>
> Am 2019-11-22 um 09:46 schrieb Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>:
> >
> > On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 at 08:51, Jan U. Hasecke wrote:
> >>
> >> I am very interested in running ConTeXt as a service, too. I am still
> >> nurturing the idea of a publishing cooperative for self publishers with
> >> a Markdown --> Pandoc --> ConTeXt workflow with a nice web frontend. I
> >> hope to make it to the next ConTeXt meeting to discuss it.
> >
> > If you want to start from a simple markup language, at least go for
> > asciidoc or restructured text.
> > Markdown is a mess for anything but very very very trivial structure,
> > and very very soon you basically end up with "basically ugly html with
> > some embeded plain text every now and then".
> >
> > There is some proof-of-concept test document which goes via the
> >    asciidoc --[asciidoctor]--> docbook (xml) --[context]--> pdf
> > path (but it needs more work to be fully useful).
>
> Wouldn’t it make sense to go (X)HTML->ConTeXt?
>
> Then you can use one of the online JS editors like CKeditor.\

Only if you spend an enormous amount of effort making sure that the
code is properly cleaned up rather than containing a gazillion random
html style tags which you can never reconstruct back into some
structured form.

(And yes, my impression is that Massi spent a huge amount of effort in
configuring the editor and cleaning up the mess. My company didn't and
ended up with sometimes literally every word in a sentence using a
different font size or style. They gave up on html + cke pretty soon,
but couldn't be convinced that this was a bad idea upfront.)

Mojca
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[denis.maier.lists]

Thank you for all the responses and the inspiration. I'll have to think about what is possible and what might be of use for others, but the initial idea to create a plugin looks actually quite feasible to me now, apart from the fact that I don't know PHP which is needed for OJS plugins, but that's another story...

Best,
Denis
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Jan U. Hasecke]

Am 22.11.19 um 10:05 schrieb Henning Hraban Ramm:
> Am 2019-11-22 um 09:46 schrieb Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>:
>>
>> On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 at 08:51, Jan U. Hasecke wrote:
>>>
>>> I am very interested in running ConTeXt as a service, too. I am still
>>> nurturing the idea of a publishing cooperative for self publishers with
>>> a Markdown --> Pandoc --> ConTeXt workflow with a nice web frontend. I
>>> hope to make it to the next ConTeXt meeting to discuss it.
>>
>> If you want to start from a simple markup language, at least go for
>> asciidoc or restructured text.
>> Markdown is a mess for anything but very very very trivial structure,
>> and very very soon you basically end up with "basically ugly html with
>> some embeded plain text every now and then".
>>
>> There is some proof-of-concept test document which goes via the
>>    asciidoc --[asciidoctor]--> docbook (xml) --[context]--> pdf
>> path (but it needs more work to be fully useful).
> 
> Wouldn’t it make sense to go (X)HTML->ConTeXt?

This is what I am currently doing locally with Pablos
from-pandoc-to-context workflow.

juh
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Am 2019-11-22 um 09:46 schrieb Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>:
> 
> On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 at 08:51, Jan U. Hasecke wrote:
>> 
>> I am very interested in running ConTeXt as a service, too. I am still
>> nurturing the idea of a publishing cooperative for self publishers with
>> a Markdown --> Pandoc --> ConTeXt workflow with a nice web frontend. I
>> hope to make it to the next ConTeXt meeting to discuss it.
> 
> If you want to start from a simple markup language, at least go for
> asciidoc or restructured text.
> Markdown is a mess for anything but very very very trivial structure,
> and very very soon you basically end up with "basically ugly html with
> some embeded plain text every now and then".
> 
> There is some proof-of-concept test document which goes via the
>    asciidoc --[asciidoctor]--> docbook (xml) --[context]--> pdf
> path (but it needs more work to be fully useful).

Wouldn’t it make sense to go (X)HTML->ConTeXt?

Then you can use one of the online JS editors like CKeditor.

Massi can tell more, I guess; i.e. he already told us a lot, I just can’t remember the details.
For his MEO project he extended one of the editors to allow for additional markup.


Greetlings, Hraban
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 at 08:51, Jan U. Hasecke wrote:
>
> I am very interested in running ConTeXt as a service, too. I am still
> nurturing the idea of a publishing cooperative for self publishers with
> a Markdown --> Pandoc --> ConTeXt workflow with a nice web frontend. I
> hope to make it to the next ConTeXt meeting to discuss it.

If you want to start from a simple markup language, at least go for
asciidoc or restructured text.
Markdown is a mess for anything but very very very trivial structure,
and very very soon you basically end up with "basically ugly html with
some embeded plain text every now and then".

There is some proof-of-concept test document which goes via the
    asciidoc --[asciidoctor]--> docbook (xml) --[context]--> pdf
path (but it needs more work to be fully useful).

Mojca
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Jan U. Hasecke]

Am 20.11.19 um 18:10 schrieb Henning Hraban Ramm:
> Hi!
> 
> I’m running ConTeXt on my web server e.g. to generate shipping forms for a customer.
> 
> As Hans said, it makes sense to use an asynchronous setup; in my case it’s celery/RabbitMQ behind Django.
> 
> You probably need to set a few environment variables: I find HOME, PATH, TEXROOT and TEXMFOS in my setup. I don’t know if you really need all of them, it’s already running for several years…
> Also your web server process might only run binaries that belong to some user/group like wwwrun.
> 
> It won’t work in shared hosting, because you can’t install your own programs.

Generally this is correct. But there are providers such as the
Hostsharing cooperative where it is possible to install programs in a
shared hosting environment. We do it for years. ;-)

> Otherwise: What kind of documentation do you need? Installing ConTeXt on a (web) server is not different from any other Linux system. Calling ConTeXt from a web application is not different from calling any other external program. The rest depends on your setup and web frameworks.

I am very interested in running ConTeXt as a service, too. I am still
nurturing the idea of a publishing cooperative for self publishers with
a Markdown --> Pandoc --> ConTeXt workflow with a nice web frontend. I
hope to make it to the next ConTeXt meeting to discuss it.

Many greetings
juh

-- 
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Souveränität – Nachhaltigkeit – Exzellenz
https://www.hostsharing.net
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Hans Hagen]

On 11/20/2019 6:10 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

> You probably need to set a few environment variables: I find HOME, PATH, TEXROOT and TEXMFOS in my setup. I don’t know if you really need all of them, it’s already running for several years…
> Also your web server process might only run binaries that belong to some user/group like wwwrun.

normally you can run with the full path, so, here we do

/data/site/context/tex/texmf-linux-64/bin/mtxrun ..script context .....

and the /data/site/context/tex/ root will be used then

(usually we have a resource and dodument sourse tree on an nfs share; 
there are documents in the distribution that explain how to deal with 
using trees and locating resources in there withput the need to scan the 
whole tree each time)

Hans

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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Hi!

I’m running ConTeXt on my web server e.g. to generate shipping forms for a customer.

As Hans said, it makes sense to use an asynchronous setup; in my case it’s celery/RabbitMQ behind Django.

You probably need to set a few environment variables: I find HOME, PATH, TEXROOT and TEXMFOS in my setup. I don’t know if you really need all of them, it’s already running for several years…
Also your web server process might only run binaries that belong to some user/group like wwwrun.

It won’t work in shared hosting, because you can’t install your own programs.

Otherwise: What kind of documentation do you need? Installing ConTeXt on a (web) server is not different from any other Linux system. Calling ConTeXt from a web application is not different from calling any other external program. The rest depends on your setup and web frameworks.

Greetlings, Hraban
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> Am 2019-11-20 um 17:07 schrieb Denis Maier <maier.de@gmail.com>:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> Is it possible to run ConTeXt as a service on a server? If yes, is there documentation about this?
> Background: I'm currently on the PKP conference, and we are discussing OJS plugins for automated PDF production. I was wondering if ConTeXt could be an option...
> Best, 
> Denis
> 
> P.S.: I'll be giving here a brief introduction to XML typesetting with ConTeXt to spread the word... just to let you know.
> 
> ___________________________________________________________________________________
> 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
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Re: ConTeXt as a service

[Hans Hagen]

On 11/20/2019 5:07 PM, Denis Maier wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> Is it possible to run ConTeXt as a service on a server? If yes, is there 
> documentation about this?
> Background: I'm currently on the PKP conference, and we are discussing 
> OJS plugins for automated PDF production. I was wondering if ConTeXt 
> could be an option...
> Best,
> Denis
> 
> P.S.: I'll be giving here a brief introduction to XML typesetting with 
> ConTeXt to spread the word... just to let you know.
Running tex on demand is not really a problem but when it has to happen 
after clicking a button there is the problem of preventing a (web) 
server locking due to such aprocess as a tex run normally takes some 
time ... can be a second for some simple document but mayb eminutes for 
a 500 page document with images on each page and some 4 runs needed to 
get all cross references and lists right

so, one ends up with some independent service with a cue and a way to 
query the state of a run

there is actually code in the distribution (or can be added) that can be 
used but i never came to document it in detail (it makes no sense if 
only i use it) .. it boils down to delegating to one or more vm running 
a service that runs and reports status

among the aspects to take into account are:

- are resources needed (can be some mount)
- how long does the result needs to be kept
- when is stuff cleaned up
- how to keep things secure (no problem with xml)

etc

anyway, we have some of such workflows and once they work they do so 
forever

Hans


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ConTeXt as a service

[Denis Maier]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 410 bytes --]

Hi everyone,
Is it possible to run ConTeXt as a service on a server? If yes, is there
documentation about this?
Background: I'm currently on the PKP conference, and we are discussing OJS
plugins for automated PDF production. I was wondering if ConTeXt could be
an option...
Best,
Denis

P.S.: I'll be giving here a brief introduction to XML typesetting with
ConTeXt to spread the word... just to let you know.

[-- Attachment #1.2: Type: text/html, Size: 599 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 493 bytes --]

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