My first week with ConTeXt

My first week with ConTeXt

[Andreas Gschwendtner]

Hello everyone,

I have been using ConTeXt and reading this list silently for a week 
now. I am quite impressed by the features and the flexibility ConTeXt 
has to offer -- yet, I am still a little bit anxious to give up all the 
things I have got used to in LaTeX. What I am trying to do at the 
moment, is convert some LaTeX documents to ConTeXt. Some things have 
indeed been easier than expected, while others seem to be a lot of work 
and can be quite troublesome...

I am sorry if anything I am about to ask has already been covered here 
or if the answer is in the manuals -- at the beginning it is sometimes 
quite hard to look in the right places.

-- At first, a general request rather than a question:
Learning ConTeXt would be _much_ easier if there were more example 
files around. At some points the manuals are hard to understand and 
some things are not even covered. I learned a lot in LaTeX, too, by 
taking some example file and modifying it to suit my needs. A read 
somewhere (although I can't remember where) that the sources to all 
documents available from pragma-ade.com "are or will be made public". 
This would be great! In the meantime I would appreciate any links to 
examples. How do other ConTeXt users realize Styles for their index and 
their bibliography? How do they set up headers, footers, chapter and 
section headings, pagestyles, etc...

-- \placefigure (caption) question #1:
For some of my figures I want to have captions _below_ the figure, but 
the caption should be wider than the figure itself (if the figure is 
0.5\textwidth and centered, I want the caption to be 0.9\textwidth or 
even \textwidth). How do I do that?

-- \placefigure (caption) question #2:
Some of my figures are quite tall (= \textheight), so the caption 
cannot be below or above, but has to be _beside_ the figure. I want 
those figures to appear *left* on *odd* pages and *right* on *even* 
pages, and the captions vice versa. I don't want to have the caption in 
the outer margin, but rather the width of the figure plus the width of 
the caption should be equal to \textwidth.

Thanks for any hints!

Andreas

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Mari Voipio]

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Andreas Gschwendtner wrote:
> -- \placefigure (caption) question #1:
> For some of my figures I want to have captions _below_ the figure, but
> the caption should be wider than the figure itself (if the figure is
> 0.5\textwidth and centered, I want the caption to be 0.9\textwidth or
> even \textwidth). How do I do that?

Took me a year and a half to find out about this one, but this works for
me now:

\setupcaptions
	[width=\textwidth, % makes caption as wide as text
	 align=middle]	% aligns caption in the middle (of text + pic)

Note: all my captions (figures + tables) are under the pictures; as I
haven't done anything about it, I'd assume it being the default setting.


Mari

PS. While I cannot share the contents of my ConTeXt files at this point,
I'll be glad to send you the setup part of my file(s) - although I don't
probably do very "beautiful" ConTeXt code here, it is fairly simple and
well documented (as others will need to understand it as well).

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Patrick Gundlach]

Hello Mari,

[...]

> Took me a year and a half to find out about this one, but this works for
> me now:

I hope it was not the only thing you were doing :)

Patrick

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Andreas Gschwendtner]

On Wednesday, Sep 10, 2003, at 10:40 Europe/Berlin, Mari Voipio wrote:

> Took me a year and a half to find out about this one, but this works 
> for
> me now:
>
> \setupcaptions
> 	[width=\textwidth, % makes caption as wide as text
> 	 align=middle]	% aligns caption in the middle (of text + pic)
>
> Note: all my captions (figures + tables) are under the pictures; as I
> haven't done anything about it, I'd assume it being the default 
> setting.

Thanks for the reply!
Hmmm... so it is not as trivial as it seems! But for the explained 
reasons, I need captions to be besides the figures as well as below... 
I am sure somebody else must have solved this problem before?!

Andreas

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Willi Egger]

Hi Andreas,

Though not a wizzard ... Did you try to use the \setupcaption :

\setupcaptions
[location=top|bottom|none|high|low|middle,
 width=fit|broad|max|dimension,
 minwidth=fit|dimension,
 headstyle=normal|bold|slanted|boldslanted|type|cap|small...|command,
 style=normal|bold|slanted|boldslanted|type|cap|small...|command,
 number=yes|no,
 inbetween=command,
 align=left|middle|right|no,
 conversion=numbers|characters|Characters|romannumerals|Romannumerals,
 way=bytext|by*section,
 separator=text,
 command=command,
 distance=dimension]

May be you need to use this command in connection with the figures in
question. May be a \bgroup \egroup around the setupcommand together with the
placefigure command helps to keep everything local. Probably you want to
write a macro which saves typeing....


Willi
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andreas Gschwendtner" <gschwendtner@gmx.com>
To: <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 12:21 PM
Subject: Re: [NTG-context] My first week with ConTeXt


> On Wednesday, Sep 10, 2003, at 10:40 Europe/Berlin, Mari Voipio wrote:
>
> > Took me a year and a half to find out about this one, but this works
> > for
> > me now:
> >
> > \setupcaptions
> > [width=\textwidth, % makes caption as wide as text
> > align=middle] % aligns caption in the middle (of text + pic)
> >
> > Note: all my captions (figures + tables) are under the pictures; as I
> > haven't done anything about it, I'd assume it being the default
> > setting.
>
> Thanks for the reply!
> Hmmm... so it is not as trivial as it seems! But for the explained
> reasons, I need captions to be besides the figures as well as below...
> I am sure somebody else must have solved this problem before?!
>
> Andreas
>
> _______________________________________________
> ntg-context mailing list
> ntg-context@ntg.nl
> http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
>

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Andreas Gschwendtner]

On Wednesday, Sep 10, 2003, at 16:18 Europe/Berlin, Willi Egger wrote:

> Hi Andreas,
>
> Though not a wizzard ... Did you try to use the \setupcaption :
[...snip...]
> May be you need to use this command in connection with the figures in
> question. May be a \bgroup \egroup around the setupcommand together 
> with the
> placefigure command helps to keep everything local. Probably you want 
> to
> write a macro which saves typeing....

thanks for your reply! This sounds like a solution -- I just didn't 
have time to test it yet... And I still have to learn a lot about 
ConTeXt, e. g. the \bgroup \egroup commands are new to me. I am 
wondering if somebody else has already done this before?

Thanks for your support,

Andreas

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Patrick Gundlach]

Hello Andreas,

> somewhere (although I can't remember where) that the sources to all
> documents available from pragma-ade.com "are or will be made public".
> This would be great! 

could you provide some examples of what kind of documents you would
like to see and what especially you would like to learn?


> In the meantime I would appreciate any links to examples.

Have a look the user links on the ConTeXt homepage and the s-pre-* in
the ConTeXt distribution. 

Patrick

Re: Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Andreas Gschwendtner]

On Wednesday, Sep 10, 2003, at 14:35 Europe/Berlin, Patrick Gundlach 
wrote:

> could you provide some examples of what kind of documents you would
> like to see and what especially you would like to learn?

Basically I want to typeset scientific documents in the form of a book 
-- nothing to fancy, nothing interactive. As a starting point, I would 
be very happy to have all the functionality back that I am used to with 
LaTeX and KOMA-Script:

- Placing figures and captions (see earlier questions in this thread)
- Different examples of formatting the table of contents (e.g. 
indenting sections and sub(...)sections, setting chapters boldface sans 
serif...)
- How to format the index (divided into sections preceeded by the 
appropriate uppercase letter, pagenumbers aligned right, "\dotfill" 
between word and pagenumber)
- How to format the bibliography (e. g. vertical space between the 
entrys)
- Define different page styles for the first page of each chapter (e. 
g. no headers) and the following pages

Not that I don't want to read manuals and experiment myself -- it just 
would be a big time saver to see how other people do things like 
that... As always, time is short if you are trying to finish a project 
-- at the moment I spend more time learning than writing text. Thanks 
for any support!

Andreas

Re: Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Holger Schöner]

Hi Andreas,

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Andreas Gschwendtner wrote:
> Basically I want to typeset scientific documents in the form of a book
> -- nothing to fancy, nothing interactive. As a starting point, I would
> be very happy to have all the functionality back that I am used to with
> LaTeX and KOMA-Script:
>
> - Placing figures and captions (see earlier questions in this thread)

Unfortunately I cannot help you there (more than already done ...)

> - Different examples of formatting the table of contents (e.g.
> indenting sections and sub(...)sections, setting chapters boldface sans
> serif...)

In "ConTeXt the manual" (cont-enp.pdf) there are some examples (p. 149ff.).
To achieve formatting dependent on heading level, you can setup their lists
separately, eg. \setuplist[chapter][...] \setuplist[section][...]. These
setups should be kept also in the combined list (content). This way you
could provide different indenting space (margin and distance) for different
sublevels. The key "style" is understood as well
(\setuplist[chapter][style=bold]), and in case the available style do not
suffice, you can provide commands:
	\setuplist[chapter][style={\ss\bf}]
to get sans serif boldface.

> - How to format the index (divided into sections preceeded by the
> appropriate uppercase letter, pagenumbers aligned right, "\dotfill"
> between word and pagenumber)

I am wondering about that (the uppercase letter) as well.

You can right-align the numbers by typing
	\setupregister[index][distance={5pt plus 1fill}]
unfortunately this does not give you the opportunity to fill the space with
dots.

> - How to format the bibliography (e. g. vertical space between the
> entrys)

As far as I remember, the bibliography module uses descriptions to format
the entries; ie. it should be possible to use \setupdescriptions[...][...]
to tune spacing (eg. the keys "before", "after", "inbetween"). I remeber
having read about it in the bibliography manual, there should be more in
there.

> - Define different page styles for the first page of each chapter (e.
> g. no headers) and the following pages

You use eg.
	\setupheadertexts[text][][section][chapter][]
	\setupheader[state=normal,style={\ss},leftwidth=10cm,rightwidth=10cm]
for general setup, and for the chapter pages
	\setuphead[chapter][header=high,page=right]
instead of "high" you can also use "empty" (first removes header
completely, second leaves the space, although it is empty). You can also
define you own special header/footer texts:
	\definetext[chapter][footer][pagenumber]
	\setuphead[chapter][header=high,footer=chapter,page=right]
if you need a special footer on chapter pages. This is all in the mentioned
manual (p. 80f.).

But I know how hard it is to keep in memory where everything is written (or
at least, what is written ...) ;-)

-- 
Holger F. Schoener	TU Berlin; Dept. IV: EE and Computer Science
hfsch@cs.tu-berlin.de	http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~hfsch/
Rooms FR2525		Tel: +49-30-314-73115, Fax: -73121
Office FR 2-1		Franklinstr. 28/29, D-10587 Berlin, Germany

Re: Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Andreas Gschwendtner]

On Wednesday, Sep 10, 2003, at 17:33 Europe/Berlin, Holger Schöner 
wrote:

>> - How to format the index (divided into sections preceeded by the
>> appropriate uppercase letter, pagenumbers aligned right, "\dotfill"
>> between word and pagenumber)
>
> I am wondering about that (the uppercase letter) as well.

I managed to get uppercase letters by using the MakeIndex program 
instead of ConTeXt's built in features -- it was mentioned in an 
earlier thread on this list... But of course my LaTeX-index-styles 
don't work with ConTeXt, and so far I didn't manage to get all the 
letters on the right place (some strange things happened there...). 
Using ConTeXt's built in features would be much smoother, maybe there 
is (or will be) a way to realize those kind of things without 
additional packages/programs, too.

> As far as I remember, the bibliography module uses descriptions to 
> format
> the entries; ie. it should be possible to use 
> \setupdescriptions[...][...]
> to tune spacing (eg. the keys "before", "after", "inbetween"). I 
> remeber
> having read about it in the bibliography manual, there should be more 
> in
> there.

thanks. I will have a look!

Andreas

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 519 bytes --]


Am Mittwoch, 10.09.03, um 16:31 Uhr (Europe/Zurich) schrieb Andreas 
Gschwendtner:
> Basically I want to typeset scientific documents in the form of a book 
> -- nothing to fancy, nothing interactive. As a starting point, I would 
> be very happy to have all the functionality back that I am used to 
> with LaTeX and KOMA-Script:

Here's the environment file of my last book project.
Perhaps it is of some use for you (and others).
It contains some magic by Hans and other wizards from this list (thank 
you again!).

[-- Attachment #2: env_uno.tex --]
[-- Type: application/x-tex, Size: 4249 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #3: Type: text/plain, Size: 61 bytes --]



Grüßlis vom Hraban!
-- 
http://www.fiee.net/texnique/

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Am Mittwoch, 10.09.03, um 10:25 Uhr (Europe/Zurich) schrieb Andreas 
Gschwendtner:

> Learning ConTeXt would be _much_ easier if there were more example 
> files around.

I guess from your name that you understand german?
There's a german ConTeXt tutorial (PDF and sources) at my site:
http://www.fiee.net/texnique/?menu=0-1&lang=de

It's in no way complete, but it should enlighten your first steps.

Grüßlis vom Hraban!
-- 
http://www.fiee.net/texnique/

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Andreas Gschwendtner]

On Wednesday, Sep 10, 2003, at 20:06 Europe/Berlin, Henning Hraban Ramm 
wrote:

> I guess from your name that you understand german?

Yes, I do ;)

> There's a german ConTeXt tutorial (PDF and sources) at my site:
> http://www.fiee.net/texnique/?menu=0-1&lang=de

Thanks. Unfortunately, I ran into all kinds of errors when trying to 
compile those documents -- but I am working on it... But just looking 
at the source and copying&pasting&modifying pieces of code is helpful, 
too.

Thanks all of you for your support!

Andreas

Re: My first week with ConTeXt

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Am Donnerstag, 11.09.03, um 09:26 Uhr (Europe/Zurich) schrieb Andreas 
Gschwendtner:

>> There's a german ConTeXt tutorial (PDF and sources) at my site:
>> http://www.fiee.net/texnique/?menu=0-1&lang=de
> Thanks. Unfortunately, I ran into all kinds of errors when trying to 
> compile those documents -- but I am working on it... But just looking 
> at the source and copying&pasting&modifying pieces of code is helpful, 
> too.

The sources can't work standalone, they need additional pictures and 
fonts, and maybe more.

Either you look at the PDFs or you must do with the sources what you 
did...

Grüßlis vom Hraban!
-- 
http://www.fiee.net/texnique/