Re: ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 07:14, Chris Lott wrote:
>
> 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to
> efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting
> them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word...
> is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list,
> but it would be nice.

ConTeXt only support XHTML to some extent. Now that xhtml backend is
done, creating support for rtf should be a lot easier to do than
before xhtml export was there, but unless some substantial funding is
found, it is unlikely to ever be implemented. Honestly I see no reason
why anyone would want to have RTF. Even if your colleagues get a
document in RTF and fix a few things, it won't at all be easy to
integrate that back. tex4ht most probably offers export to RTF, but
since author's death it is nearly impossible to request any
substantial feature. I bet that ConTeXt doesn't work with tex4ht any
more.

Roger suggested markdown/pandoc. It is limited to some extent, but if
you are happy with its set of features, you could probably use it for
export into both RTF and XHMTL. Of course then you can forget about
lua sugars in ConTeXt ...

> And *what* is
> the deal with xetex? It seems to be the easiest way for accessing all
> my fonts, but it also hasn't been updated for years and, since it is
> tied to an old version of ConTeXt (as far as I can tell) it doesn't
> seem like much of a winner.

In ConTeXt MKIV with LuaTeX it is just as easy to access the fonts as
it is in XeTeX. (It is only in plain LuaTeX that accessing fonts needs
some fiddling.) You get even more flexibility.

With XeTeX there are two major problems:

1.) ConTeXt never took advantages of all of its features. Ever since
LuaTeX came to the scene, support for XeTeX in ConTeXt was pretty much
frozen. XeTeX still works as well as pdfTeX, with the option to load
OTF fonts, but there is no high-level support for some other low-level
language-related features (interchar tokens, ...) or OpenType math
(but that one is broken in XeTeX anyway).

2.) no maintenance of engine (no bugfixing)

Still, XeTeX is able to handle some exotic scripts for which there is
no support in ConTeXt yet, but that shouldn't be an issue for you.

Mojca
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