Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
Roger Mason rmason at mun.ca writes: Chris, Chris Lott chris at chrislott.org writes: 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice. 4) How about X/HTML? this is my lowest level need but, again, it would be nice. One option would be to use markdown with pandoc. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ I mostly write in ConTeXt, but if I know I must share with users of word processors then markdown + pandoc is a good option. And to the OP's original point about academic writing, pandoc has built-in (if fairly new) citation processing. I would think it would work quite well for work in the humanities. I would give pandoc a try and see if it fits your needs, and then use TeX in some form to get PDF output. Bruce ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
| Another possibility is to use org-mode in Emacs, export to Latex and from | there to ConTeXt. In my case, the last step is accomplished by a home-brewed | ruby script which covers the most common layout commands | Have you already considered writing `org-context.el'? I can't afford learning another language - not now. But it would be great if somebody did it. Cheers, Jörg ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
Welcome to ConTeXt! I'm a relatively new user so my answers will be brief and partial, but I'm sure others will be able to expand on them. On Tue 13 Dec 2011, Chris Lott wrote: 1) My work is primarily in the humanities and end-user technologies, with small amounts of coding. So mathematics isn't an issue. I do a fair amount of highly academic writing (aka: many sections, citations [handling this in a sensible way is really important], footnotes) with the occasional need for charts, graphs, and photos. In other words, I'm not doing the kind of layout one might associate with InDesign or the like. I also write many paper letters (personal), poetry, fiction, essays, and the like. This looks to me like a good use case for ConTeXt. I've used it for a 380-page dissertation with the full complement of academic paraphernalia: footnotes, appendices, table of figures, citations etc. which all worked well for me. I believe that many others are using it for similar work. 2) That said, I (obviously) have a keen interest in typography, and that includes wanting to use some particular typefaces... I've paid good money for many of them, so why not? I've found ConTeXt to be more pleasant than LaTeX for setting up the layout and typography according to my wishes. (When I used LaTeX I generally just went with the default layout and accepted that things would be a little ugly.) ConTeXt is also good about letting you use your own typefaces -- particularly if they're in OpenType format. 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice. 4) How about X/HTML? this is my lowest level need but, again, it would be nice. I know that ConTeXt supports direct XHTML output but I'm not sure how mature it is -- I think someone else will be able to provide a more complete answer to this. So, do you think ConTeXt makes more sense than LaTeX? And *what* is the deal with xetex? It seems to be the easiest way for accessing all my fonts, but it also hasn't been updated for years and, since it is tied to an old version of ConTeXt (as far as I can tell) it doesn't seem like much of a winner. In short, there are two versions of ConTeXt: Mk II (stable, and frozen for some time now) and Mk IV (actively developed, new betas more than once a month). Mk II can use pdftex or xetex as the engine; Mk IV uses luatex, which provides the ‘it just works’ font handling of xetex alongside a number of other features (chiefly the integration of the lua scripting language). Despite the worries that may be occasionaed by the word ‘beta’, Mk IV is pretty stable and definitely the recommended option these days. Hope this helps! Pont ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
Chris, Chris Lott ch...@chrislott.org writes: 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice. 4) How about X/HTML? this is my lowest level need but, again, it would be nice. One option would be to use markdown with pandoc. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ I mostly write in ConTeXt, but if I know I must share with users of word processors then markdown + pandoc is a good option. Cheers, Roger ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 07:14, Chris Lott wrote: 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice. ConTeXt only support XHTML to some extent. Now that xhtml backend is done, creating support for rtf should be a lot easier to do than before xhtml export was there, but unless some substantial funding is found, it is unlikely to ever be implemented. Honestly I see no reason why anyone would want to have RTF. Even if your colleagues get a document in RTF and fix a few things, it won't at all be easy to integrate that back. tex4ht most probably offers export to RTF, but since author's death it is nearly impossible to request any substantial feature. I bet that ConTeXt doesn't work with tex4ht any more. Roger suggested markdown/pandoc. It is limited to some extent, but if you are happy with its set of features, you could probably use it for export into both RTF and XHMTL. Of course then you can forget about lua sugars in ConTeXt ... And *what* is the deal with xetex? It seems to be the easiest way for accessing all my fonts, but it also hasn't been updated for years and, since it is tied to an old version of ConTeXt (as far as I can tell) it doesn't seem like much of a winner. In ConTeXt MKIV with LuaTeX it is just as easy to access the fonts as it is in XeTeX. (It is only in plain LuaTeX that accessing fonts needs some fiddling.) You get even more flexibility. With XeTeX there are two major problems: 1.) ConTeXt never took advantages of all of its features. Ever since LuaTeX came to the scene, support for XeTeX in ConTeXt was pretty much frozen. XeTeX still works as well as pdfTeX, with the option to load OTF fonts, but there is no high-level support for some other low-level language-related features (interchar tokens, ...) or OpenType math (but that one is broken in XeTeX anyway). 2.) no maintenance of engine (no bugfixing) Still, XeTeX is able to handle some exotic scripts for which there is no support in ConTeXt yet, but that shouldn't be an issue for you. Mojca ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
On Dec 14, 2011, at 1:31 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote: On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 07:14, Chris Lott wrote: 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice. ConTeXt only support XHTML to some extent. Now that xhtml backend is done, creating support for rtf should be a lot easier to do than before xhtml export was there, but unless some substantial funding is found, it is unlikely to ever be implemented. Honestly I see no reason why anyone would want to have RTF. Even if your colleagues get a document in RTF and fix a few things, it won't at all be easy to integrate that back. tex4ht most probably offers export to RTF, but since author's death it is nearly impossible to request any substantial feature. I bet that ConTeXt doesn't work with tex4ht any more. Roger suggested markdown/pandoc. It is limited to some extent, but if you are happy with its set of features, you could probably use it for export into both RTF and XHMTL. Of course then you can forget about lua sugars in ConTeXt ... Another possibility is to use org-mode in Emacs, export to Latex and from there to ConTeXt. In my case, the last step is accomplished by a home-brewed ruby script which covers the most common layout commands (and I'm mentioning that here in the hope that somebody who is more competent will eventually write something useful; or maybe pandoc does that, too?). This setup allows me to have everything belonging to a project in one textfile, e.g.: * Heading Notes, Ideas Lists: - item 1 - item 2 Tables: | one | two | three | Dates: ** TODO 2011-12-14 Wed 15:10 which I can collect in an agenda * Manuscript This section contains a manuscript which I can separately export as: - textfile - Latex file - HTML file - odt file (for LibreOffice, where it can be saved as a Microsoft doc) More sophisticated ConTeXt commands that are not provided for can be enclosed in #+BEGIN_LaTeX \Context command #+END_LaTeX or put behind #+LATEX: \Context command They will show up in the final ConTeXt version, but will not, of course, be translated into html, odt etc. ** Subsection :noexport: This section is part of Manuscript, but will not be exported. There are many more features, see http://orgmode.org/ Hope this helps, Jörg ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 2:22 AM, Roger Mason rma...@mun.ca wrote: 4) How about X/HTML? this is my lowest level need but, again, it would be nice. One option would be to use markdown with pandoc. [...] I mostly write in ConTeXt, but if I know I must share with users of word processors then markdown + pandoc is a good option. This is, in fact, what I do now, with the occasional export to--and massage in--LaTeX. And even when trying ConTeXt lately, I often start with that route because I much prefer composing raw text in Markdown where I can. That said, the RTF export by Pandoc, while not perfect, is a useful step. I hear Mojca's point about the difficulty of re-integrating RTF or Word/etc revisions; I share that philosophy. But many of my colleagues don't. I try to use PDF as the interchange format but many don't like dealing with them. None of that is insurmountable, or any knock on ConTeXt, it is just a consideration to--well--consider. I still have many uses for something TeX based! Thanks for the info... c -- Chris Lott ch...@chrislott.org ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 5:31 AM, Hagmann Jörg joerg.hagm...@unibas.ch wrote: Another possibility is to use org-mode in Emacs, export to Latex and from there to ConTeXt. In my case, the last step is accomplished by a home-brewed ruby script which covers the most common layout commands (and I'm mentioning that here in the hope that somebody who is more competent will eventually write something useful; or maybe pandoc does that, too?). This setup allows me to have everything belonging to a project in one textfile, e.g.: [***] That's quite interesting. Are you willing to share your Ruby script? I have used org-mode a fair amount... c -- Chris Lott ch...@chrislott.org ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
On Dec 14, 2011, at 4:38 PM, Chris Lott wrote: On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 5:31 AM, Hagmann Jörg joerg.hagm...@unibas.ch wrote: Another possibility is to use org-mode in Emacs, export to Latex and from there to ConTeXt. In my case, the last step is accomplished by a home-brewed ruby script which covers the most common layout commands (and I'm mentioning that here in the hope that somebody who is more competent will eventually write something useful; or maybe pandoc does that, too?). This setup allows me to have everything belonging to a project in one textfile, e.g.: [***] That's quite interesting. Are you willing to share your Ruby script? Not publicly (too embarrassed), but I'll send it to you tomorrow Cheers, Jörg ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
On Wed, Dec 14 2011, Hagmann Jörg wrote: Another possibility is to use org-mode in Emacs, export to Latex and from there to ConTeXt. In my case, the last step is accomplished by a home-brewed ruby script which covers the most common layout commands Have you already considered writing `org-context.el'? -- Peter ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
Le 14 décembre à 21:32:46 pmli...@free.fr (Peter Münster) écrit notamment: | On Wed, Dec 14 2011, Hagmann Jörg wrote: | Another possibility is to use org-mode in Emacs, export to Latex and from | there to ConTeXt. In my case, the last step is accomplished by a home-brewed | ruby script which covers the most common layout commands | Have you already considered writing `org-context.el'? Yet another possibility is to use muse in emacs, for which exporting to ConTeXt is *already* there (among many other formats). http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_and_emacs-muse -- Jean ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
[NTG-context] ConTeXt-- does it make sense for my needs?
Many years ago I used LaTeX quite a bit for academic work, including a fair amount of Memoir class. Back then ConTeXt was quite new, so I didn't mess with it much. Now I'm back and sick of Word/etc for the documents I need to produce as print/pdf and for interaction with colleagues. What I can't figure out is if ConTeXt makes the most sense... and if it does, I have a few questions... 1) My work is primarily in the humanities and end-user technologies, with small amounts of coding. So mathematics isn't an issue. I do a fair amount of highly academic writing (aka: many sections, citations [handling this in a sensible way is really important], footnotes) with the occasional need for charts, graphs, and photos. In other words, I'm not doing the kind of layout one might associate with InDesign or the like. I also write many paper letters (personal), poetry, fiction, essays, and the like. 2) That said, I (obviously) have a keen interest in typography, and that includes wanting to use some particular typefaces... I've paid good money for many of them, so why not? 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice. 4) How about X/HTML? this is my lowest level need but, again, it would be nice. 5) I generally use a Mac for everything, but I am pretty comfortable in the shell. I've done a bit of programming in PHP. I don't mind monkeying around, and I am interested in creating layouts that suit my needs, but digging into internals is not for me. I used Emacs extensively for years, now using mostly Vim (MacVim) and a variety of GUI editors depending on what I had for breakfast that day. So, do you think ConTeXt makes more sense than LaTeX? And *what* is the deal with xetex? It seems to be the easiest way for accessing all my fonts, but it also hasn't been updated for years and, since it is tied to an old version of ConTeXt (as far as I can tell) it doesn't seem like much of a winner. Finally, if ConTeXt is the way to go, are there any fairly comprehensive materials in one place for learning to use it? What I find on the wiki seems to go from basic to advanced without a lot of in between, and what I find on the web seems a bit fragmented. but at this point my head is in a whirl, so I might just be missing some obvious material. Thanks in advance... c -- Chris Lott ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
