Re: ConTeXt 2006.04.24 released

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2006, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

> On 4/25/06, Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com> wrote:
>> * New math environments: \startintertext and \startsubstack
>
> Is ConTeXt coming closer to what LaTeX and Nath has in way of math
> support?  I.e., are we more or less incorporating the nice stuff from
> the two into ConTeXt now?

I have been playing around with context math to see if I can do 
everything that latex+amsmath can do and the answer is yes. Have a 
look at http://dl.contextgarden.net/myway/mathalign.pdf There are 
other things that I have tested (using matrix and cases) and will be 
updating the myway document soon. The functionality of following latex 
environments is there

amsmath
=======
align
gather
alignat
split
lgather (from mathtools)
flalign
aligned  (limited features)
gathered (limited features)
lgathered(limited features)
matrix
pmatrix
bmatrix
Bmatrix
vmatrix
Vmatrix
cases
substack
intertext


The syntax is different, and the internals are different, so you do 
not get the  "same result" as latex. If you really want exact same 
result, you can coax context to do so, but I do not think that it is 
worth the trouble.

In some cases, the context support is much better than latex+packages. 
See what can be done for numbered multicolumn aligns, which AFAIK are 
hard to do in latex.

There are a few (very few) features missing to be able to reproduce 
ALL the functionality of amsmath. One is multline equation 
environment, but I do not know how all its details in amsmath, so can 
not comment on whether the same is doable with context. Another 
missing feature (I will send a detailed feature request soon) is that 
matrices are always center aligned. I would like to have 
\startmatrix[location=top|bottom|middle] to faithfully reproduce 
aligned series of environments. This should not be too hard to do, 
\vcenter is hard coded in matrix, it needs to be configurable to \vtop 
and \vbottom.

With such a feature, it is easy to provide a \wall ... \return thing 
like Nath. The other features of Nath are too extreme, and can not be 
done right now. You need to wait till Hans weaves some more magic.

If you have some specific details in mind, please post them. I am very 
interested in knowing myself on how much can the context math 
environments be pushed :-)

Aditya

-- 
Aditya Mahajan, EECS Systems, University of Michigan
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam || Ph: 7342624008