Re: Learning ConTeXt from the Ground Up

["Procházka Lukáš Ing. - Pontex s. r. o." <LPr@pontex.cz>]

Hello,

On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 07:19:44 +0200, Malte Stien <malte@stien.de> wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
>
> I have been using ConTeXt for over a year now and worked out how to do most things I need to do. Every now and then, though, I need to do something that I cannot find any information about and in most cases I post a question here on the forum. I have received great help here over the months and like to thank everyone who took the time to answer my questions. The other day, however, I had a problem, posted a message here, got an answer and the answer did not quite work; I went back to the forum, got more help...
>
> In the process I realised that I should have been able to work this out myself; I was not even able to tweak the first answer and make it work. I am an IT engineer myself, but with little time (I guess I am not unique here) and even less experience in TeX. I guess what I am saying is, that I would like to gain a much deeper understanding of ConTeXt which will allow me to "program" in ConTeXt rather than just using the documented command.
>
> To gather information about ConTeXt I have
> - read the ConTeXt Reference Manual (http://pmrb.free.fr/contextref.pdf)
> - bought a couple of the published books by Hans Hagen
> - started reading the "TeX book" by Donald Knuth

this is a normal approach - questioning, searching for answers... It's the same for ConTeXt as for LaTeX.

Personally, I started with Ltx and migrated to Ctx some years ago.

Big advantages of Ctx are:

- This forum is very alive, almost all questions are answered in short time.

- Ctx document is much more customizable by standard Ctx commands, i.e. - compared with Ltx - you don't need to go in the Ltx source and investigate how to do this-or-that. Ltx seems to me a bit "rigid" - it's not so easy to change style of heads, special paragraphs, enumerations, ...

- Ctx is still developed; AFAIK Ltx ver. 3.? is being prepared/issued several (- at least 5 -) years.

- Ctx: Some features - if they seem useful - may be implemented "on-demand", so they may be ready to use with a next beta (thanks mainly Hans; as well as Wolfgand, Aditya...).

- Although Ctx wiki is not best manual one could imagine, (pros:) it is still maintained and developed (cons: some info may be obsolete, some articles may be written in old-style fashion...)

- Ltx: I don't know how far Ltx is bound with Lua and how this relation is documented; I guess poorly. As Ctx is concerned, many (almost all?) things of TeX/Ctx core may be accessible/hookable by Lua - this is a great feature; and IMHO: as if you are "normal" programmer, programming by Lua should be much more quicker for you than doing things by TeX macro language.

So, my personal advice would be - try to stay with Ctx, I believe after some initial problems/obstacles you'll be becoming "master" and Ctx will become a good "slave".

Best regards,

Lukas


> I have even briefly flirted with the idea of switching to LaTeX mainly because it would mean having a lot more literature and a broader community at my disposal. However, I just prefer the command structure and output of ConTeXt. Can anyone relate to my problem? Am I on the right track? What else should I be doing or reading to really break into ConTeXt?
>
> Regards,
> Malte.
>
> PS: Just to be clear; I don't mean for the above to be conceived as shortcomings of ConTeXt, rather I think of them as shortcomings of myself. The developers of ConTeXt have done a fantastic job and I really enjoy writing in ConTeXt and looking at the output.
>

-- 
Ing. Lukáš Procházka [mailto:LPr@pontex.cz]
Pontex s. r. o.      [mailto:pontex@pontex.cz] [http://www.pontex.cz]
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