Re: migrating to ConTeXt

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007, Gour wrote:

> 5) I read LaTeX in proper ConTeXt pdf, but I'm interested is there some 
> helper to convert classical LaTeX book (book class) to ConTeXt? I've two 
> books which I'm considering to publish as one (~1000p) in the future, so 
> any help in conversion would be nice.

I do this quite often (ConTeXt -> LaTeX), so I am just writing my thoughts 
about this. A general purpose translator from ConTeXt to LaTeX is VERY 
difficult, because of the nature of both macro languages. However, it is 
relatively simple to convert a subset of one to the other. Currently, I 
write most of my papers in ConTeXt. For the final version of the paper, 
most journals want LaTeX. I know my style of writing ConTeXt, and can 
easily convert 95% percent of it to LaTeX using regular expressions (and 
have been thinking of exploring gema in more detail: 
http://gema.sourceforge.net/). It is easier to do the rest by hand rather 
than writing a script that takes care of all the corner cases. Usually it 
takes me around 2 hours to convert a (30-40 page) paper from ConTeXt to 
LaTeX. Since this needs to be done only once every six months or so, I 
have not spent too much time trying to optimize my approach. I think that 
the same will be true for conversion from LaTeX to ConTeXt. However, I 
would suggest that you start by writing some ConTeXt documents by hand, 
before you automate the conversion. This way, you will know what you want 
to achieve from a conversion script.

Another option is to write a ConTeXt module that will allow you to 
understand LaTeX. For most environments, this is simple. There are a few 
examples on the wiki about this.


> 6) the most important issue - by looking at luaTeX docs & archives I
> noticed that it was mentioned there is some book on ConTeXt in
> preparation - I gave up on ConTeXt in the past due to this reason -
> lack of up-to-date documentation - didn't have enough time to try to
> sovle the puzzle by inspecting different 'magazines' etc. cause I was
> able to do the kob with LaTeX for which I've documentation in the form
> of paper books.

Actually, from a user's point of view, most things are included in the 
ConTeXt manuals. They are not exhaustive or up-to-date, but do convey the 
essential information. For most tasks you do not need to know the current 
state of affairs in ConTeXt.

Aditya
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