Re: Making context produce dvi file.

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

John,

On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, John R. Culleton wrote:

> For one recurring task I first produce a booklet version 5.5. x
> 8.5in, then a straight pdf 8.5 x 11in, all controlled by modes. The
> third format is plain text. Others recommend dvi2tty for this
> conversion. But how do I get Context to produce a dvi file? The
> Context manual does not make this clear.

Not that you asked, but dvitty does not seem to be the best way to get a 
plain text output. I am assuming that you do not have maths, otherwise 
text output will not make much sense.

Assuming that you have a document with simple structure (title, section, 
header, etc), and not too complicated floats (figures and tables), and you 
want pdf and plain text, I think that starting from xml is better. For 
simple tasks, html is sufficient. For more complicated tasks, you will 
need to define your own xml schema. In either case, you can get a pdf with 
all the bells and whistles by compiling the xml (or html) file using 
context. To get a plain text output, open your file in a browser and save 
as text  (lynx --dump or links -dump will work if the file is html) to 
get a text output.

IMHO, this is much easier than trying to coax tex to output something that 
resemples a typewritter output (fixed width fonts, no hyphenation, etc)

Aditya