[...]
>>We are in a fully programmable environment,
>> and it is extremely unConTeXtish to hack the visual appearance.
>
> I am an XML author, so am pretty amazed to hear that one should not mix
> appearance and content in ConTeXt. Most of a ConTeXt document involves
> visual appearance. What is one saying when one writes \blank[12pt]?
This is visual appearance, of cource. But I am not talking about one
single instance of \blank anywhere, I am talking about changing a
reaeated statement (like the footnotes) by visual means. And
formatting instructions have no right to exist there (in fact they
should be filtered out by \sanitizelogigalmarkup{\footnote...}. This
is one of the great advantages of using a high level language such as
LaTeX or ConTeXt (and ConTeXt so much more than LaTeX) that we can
define layout in this way.
Since you come from an XML background and only have to change your
stylesheet, the hackary is doable, nobody ever sees it. But this
hackery is not to be used when using Context directly.
> Yes, that would be nice. But until I see a concrete solution, I will
> continue to use and post my solution. A rule of etiquette is that if you
> don't have a better solution, or don't want to document it, don't attack
> the current solution, not matter how impure.
Sorry, but I strongly disagree. It is not nice to teach/show other
people such code. They will take it for granted and put in their
documents. I have seen far too many LaTeX documents where exactly this
procedure leaded to unmaintainable code. It took me hours to extract
and correct those ugly hacks. One example: a person learned how to
remove indentation from a paragraph by saying \noindent. So every
paragraph had a \noindent before the paragraph (instead of doing it
right by saying \noindent0pt). And it was a long
document (and the \noindent was just one of the stupid things). So my
advice is not to publish such code without several dangerous bend
signs.
Patrick
--
ConTeXt wiki: http://contextgarden.net
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