Re: Ideas for restructuring the ConTeXt garden?

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

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On Sat, 12 Mar 2011, Henry House wrote:

> Procházka Lukáš wrote:
> [...]
>>> 5) how to better promote context to new/latex users?
>>
>> For LaTeX incomers: it would be good to provide a sample setup 
>> (module?) which would make Ctx generated .pdf looking very closely to 
>> that been generated by LaTeX.
>>
>> Now, if you see a .pdf document and you are familiar with LaTeX, you 
>> recognize immediately whether or not it was generated by LaTeX (Word's 
>> signature is also unmatchable).

I don't think that we should try to copy that style.

>> The perfect feature of ConTeXt is that all these features may be 
>> systematically altered (often [almost] impossible in LaTeX) but you 
>> must search enough and study (and maybe ask the forum) to get the 
>> result which would fulfil your aesthetic requirements.
>
> I strongly agree that sample set-up code (ideally well-commented so that
> it also serves as a tutorial of sorts) to reproduce the style of LaTeX
> would be helpful.

A better idea will be to show how to create ConTeXt style files for well 
defined styles e.g., style for some journal, say AMS or IEEE, or even the 
style of LaTeX (if someone can point out its exact specification)

> The appearance of LaTeX documents isn't perfect but it
> produces reasonably high-quality results suitable for complex technical
> documents right out of the box of the box without any tweaking, whereas
> ConTeXt requires (at least it did for me) some trouble to set it up for
> the first time. To some extent this is not because of the merit of the
> LaTeX design itself but the fact that it is familiar and therefore
> highly readable to someone used to reading it. It is also the point of
> departure for a LaTeX user wanting to convert to using ConTeXt; hence, i
> would imagine many such people would prefer to tweak a LaTeX-like
> document appearance to better suit their needs rather than starting with
> something quite different. Certainly, this was the case for me; being
> basically satisfied with my LaTeX documents but wanting more control and
> the option to use the advanced features of ConTeXt. Having sample set-up
> code that emulated LaTeX would have eased the initial transition for me.

I agree, partially. One of the difficulties in getting a good design with 
ConTeXt is that you should know what a good design is! It you have a 
pre-specified style guideline, then it is easy to reproduce it in ConTeXt. 
If not, you can be stuck up experimenting whether you the space above a 
section be twice as big the space below it or the other way round.

Aditya

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