Dear all,
in the last weeks I asked more questions than I normally do. The reason
is that my organization is discussing to roll out a
markdown-pandoc-context publication workflow.
Some time ago we started to use context to produce flyers and some other
documents. In fact I was the only one to use it. The results are so good
that we discussed how to use it more often.
Currently we use LaTeX to produce our legal documents, terms of services
etc. With ConTeXt we are able to meet our corporate design guidelines
and to produce good looking and individually designed documents.
But our authors and editors were not willing to use ConTeXt directly so
that we decided to look into Pandoc and use Markdown as authors input
markup. Markdown is much better supported by text editors than ConTeXt.
The main problem for me is to come up with a good organization of the
ConTeXt workflow so that it is easy usable and meets our requirements
for quality management.
These are quite strict. We are a Debian based cooperative and the
majority of our editors also use this distribution on their private
computers. Some use a MacBook, only one uses of Windows.
For this reason we would like to stay with the Debian ConTeXt, which I
never used as it is quite old. The same is true for Pandoc which made
some improvements in the last years and also is very old in the current
Debian distribution. As we did not decide this issue I can't say how
much I have to refactor our styles to meet the older versions of ConTeXt.
Apart from this I have to organize our style files and ressources, anyway.
In another thread Hans said how to use these folders. Thanks a lot.
texmf-local : maybe configurations
texmf-project : stuff you're working on (styles)
texmf-fonts : fonts you downloaded or bought
All our styles and our shared image folder are versioned by git so I
think that I either put links into texmf-project pointing to our style
repository and to our image repository to have easy access to these
ressources no matter how we call context or to put them into
texmf-project directly. (We did not decide yet whether we call context
from pandoc using a tmp directory for building or directly from our
build script.
If we use the current lmtx distribution, all editors would have to
install ConTeXt with the install.sh script on their private computers,
then we would either call a post installation script to clone the
repositories in texmf-project or to clone them in another folder and set
links to texmf-project. Linking seems better as I am not sure what
"context generate" would do with the .git folder inside the repositories.
All document projects are in their own repository. Currently we use a
build script to call pandoc with an individual set of arguments
including a custom context template which is stored in the document
repository, also. Inside of this template we include all the
environments we need for this particular document. We have a lot of
small environments to reuse them in different document types.
This is our plan so far.
But to role out this successfully I would like to ease the way to a
working pandoc-context installation for our editors. Do you have an idea
how to do this?
I come up with the idea of an "organizational context distribution" that
has all requirements preinstalled. That could look like this:
We have a repository:
hs.lmtx
which contains the install script and all our ressources (images and
styles).
Our editors would clone the repository and just call the installation
script to download the lmtx distribution. Afterwards they are ready to
start as we would point to the right context executable in our build
scripts.
Problem: What will happen if our editors do a git pull in hs.lmtx and a
"context generate"? There are also concerns if something breaks after
updating context with the install.sh. Is there a way to reset the
installation to a given point release? How do you solve this in a
production environment? On my private computer I sometimes install a new
version of lmtx in a "staging" folder try it out and redo updating in my
"production" folder.
I think I will try this out but I am happy if you have any comments on
this.
TIA
juh
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