Re: docs

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Thu, 14 May 2009, R. Bastian wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I would write a french & german intro-source for (quasi absolute) newcomers
> which need  to have a working system producing PDF texts.
>
> But I know nothing about ConTeXt. therefor I cant do anything without your help.
> A first series of question:
>
> -. For a newcommer, is Mk II the best choice ?

Yes. But the only major difference (from the user's point of view) in MkII 
and MkIV is typescript definitions. Other commands are mostly same.

> -. Is it necessary to know TeX ?

For the most part no. You can use ConTeXt without knowing anything about 
catcodes, text encodings (always use unicode), \hbox and \vbox (use 
\framed etc), and \halign (use tables and mathalignments). You need to 
know a bit about font handling, but ConTeXt does that completely 
differently from TeX.

> or Is ConTeXt (CTX) compatible with TeX ?

It is compatible in the sense that a plain tex document will work in 
Context. You may not always get the same output as the defaults are 
different.

> I wish to alternate french & german texts (so they can be translated in
> other languages).

Also see 
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_on_Excursion%2C_translations

The wiki page is old and the svn repo is not accessible right now, but 
someone started translating it into french.

Aditya
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