Re: Rolling out a pandoc-context publication workflow in an organization

[<denis.maier@unibe.ch>]

Hi,
in case you don't know it already, for your use-case you might also be interested in this workflow:
https://oa-pub.hos.tuhh.de/de/

It's a publishing workflow for OA-Journals. IIUC, the interesting part (in this context here) is that they use Gitlab, author in markdown, and whenever you push a commit, Gitlab actions are used to produce the final output. I think they use Pandoc and LaTeX with Docker Images, but maybe it could be possible to set something similar up with ConTeXt... 

Denis


> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: ntg-context <ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl> Im Auftrag von Jan U. Hasecke
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 1. Juli 2021 08:03
> An: mailing list for ConTeXt users <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
> Betreff: [NTG-context] Rolling out a pandoc-context publication workflow in an
> organization
> 
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> in the last weeks I asked more questions than I normally do. The reason is that
> my organization is discussing to roll out a markdown-pandoc-context
> publication workflow.
> 
> Some time ago we started to use context to produce flyers and some other
> documents. In fact I was the only one to use it. The results are so good that we
> discussed how to use it more often.
> 
> Currently we use LaTeX to produce our legal documents, terms of services etc.
> With ConTeXt we are able to meet our corporate design guidelines and to
> produce good looking and individually designed documents.
> 
> But our authors and editors were not willing to use ConTeXt directly so that we
> decided to look into Pandoc and use Markdown as authors input markup.
> Markdown is much better supported by text editors than ConTeXt.
> 
> The main problem for me is to come up with a good organization of the
> ConTeXt workflow so that it is easy usable and meets our requirements for
> quality management.
> 
> These are quite strict. We are a Debian based cooperative and the majority of
> our editors also use this distribution on their private computers. Some use a
> MacBook, only one uses of Windows.
> 
> For this reason we would like to stay with the Debian ConTeXt, which I never
> used as it is quite old. The same is true for Pandoc which made some
> improvements in the last years and also is very old in the current Debian
> distribution. As we did not decide this issue I can't say how much I have to
> refactor our styles to meet the older versions of ConTeXt.
> 
> Apart from this I have to organize our style files and ressources, anyway.
> 
> In another thread Hans said how to use these folders. Thanks a lot.
> 
> texmf-local   : maybe configurations
> texmf-project : stuff you're working on (styles)
> texmf-fonts   : fonts you downloaded or bought
> 
> All our styles and our shared image folder are versioned by git so I think that I
> either put links into texmf-project pointing to our style repository and to our
> image repository to have easy access to these ressources no matter how we
> call context or to put them into texmf-project directly. (We did not decide yet
> whether we call context from pandoc using a tmp directory for building or
> directly from our build script.
> 
> If we use the current lmtx distribution, all editors would have to install ConTeXt
> with the install.sh script on their private computers, then we would either call a
> post installation script to clone the repositories in texmf-project or to clone
> them in another folder and set links to texmf-project. Linking seems better as I
> am not sure what "context generate" would do with the .git folder inside the
> repositories.
> 
> All document projects are in their own repository. Currently we use a build
> script to call pandoc with an individual set of arguments including a custom
> context template which is stored in the document repository, also. Inside of this
> template we include all the environments we need for this particular
> document. We have a lot of small environments to reuse them in different
> document types.
> 
> This is our plan so far.
> 
> But to role out this successfully I would like to ease the way to a working
> pandoc-context installation for our editors. Do you have an idea how to do this?
> 
> I come up with the idea of an "organizational context distribution" that has all
> requirements preinstalled. That could look like this:
> 
> We have a repository:
> 
> hs.lmtx
> 
> which contains the install script and all our ressources (images and styles).
> 
> Our editors would clone the repository and just call the installation script to
> download the lmtx distribution. Afterwards they are ready to start as we would
> point to the right context executable in our build scripts.
> 
> Problem: What will happen if our editors do a git pull in hs.lmtx and a "context
> generate"? There are also concerns if something breaks after updating context
> with the install.sh. Is there a way to reset the installation to a given point
> release? How do you solve this in a production environment? On my private
> computer I sometimes install a new version of lmtx in a "staging" folder try it
> out and redo updating in my "production" folder.
> 
> I think I will try this out but I am happy if you have any comments on this.
> 
> TIA
> juh
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