On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 10:18 PM, Tobias Famulla <uni@famulla.eu> wrote:

> Hello Mailing-List,
>
> I used Latex for a few years in university to create reports for
> assignments and also to write my bachelor thesis (I would have liked to
> use Context, but the right schema for citation was not available and I
> had no time to create it myself).
> Over the time I got a little bit frustrated with Latex, because it has
> many modules and most of the time gets the job done, but writing Latex
> can sometimes be quite hard sometime to me (you have to have the modules
> installed, tweak around with charactersets, imagepositioning, ...).
>
> In between I looked at much smaller and sleaker document representations
> languages (asciidoc, restructuredText, Markdown) and writing in it is a
> pleasure compared to Latex (I haven't really tried out Context but
> looked over the documentation and it looked more promising but shares
> the same design ideas).
> Asciidoc is even able to declarate source code listings and formulas.
> Never the less, the output to Pdf is not always the nicest one.
>
> The reason why I now write to this list, is, that I imagine, that
> Context could be the right processor to create beautiful PDFs out of
> intermediate formats (DocBook 5 or Asciidoc). For the conversion to
> Latex a module for asciidoctor (ruby implementation) is in developement.
> The ideal system I imagine would be close to what is used with HTML and
> CSS on the web: Having a easy to use file format to writing you
> documents (Asciidoc or DocBook as intermediate format) and a system to
> create the PDFs (maybe Context and a Context-Template)
>
> So my main questions are:
> - Are there straigt forward ways to create PDFs with Context using
> Docbook 5?
> - Are there "not that hard" possibilites to write extentions to Context
> to do exactly that (maybe using Lua)?
> - Does it make more sense, when using another input format like
> Asciidoc, to write a converter which directly creates a
> Context-document? (although it might be more versatile to use DocBook
> for other formats like Markdown or DocBook itself)
>
> Context alredy has a kind of xslt processor written in lpeg and embedded
into the format.
--- see  for example http://wiki.contextgarden.net/XML
The DocBook is a huge specification, so
I guess that a convert for ConTeXt takes a huge amount of work if you want
to map everything --- but it is feasible if you plan to start with a small
subset.
From this point of view, Docbook already has a xslt to latex,
so  working on a xslt to context maybe makes more sense, if one accepts
that context is still evolving.


-- 
luigi