Re: the ConTeXt terminal

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On 6/14/06, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> Mojca,
>
> Is there a web page for ConTeXt somewhere?

http://wiki.contextgarden.net

> I see the discussion list and a program called PRAGMA that uses ConTeXt.

PRAGMA is the name of the author's company (he develops it for his
company, but helps other users a lot).

> Does ConTeXt have a graphics engine beyond TeX's rather limited graphics capabilities?

Yes and no. It's still based on TeX (going to its limits though and
constantly requesting/developing new functionality of pdfTeX), but it
has a rich set of macros and perl/ruby scripts which do some "magic"
with metapost (extension to metafont).

See http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/metafun-s.pdf (or any
cover of the manuals listed on http://www.pragma-ade.com/overview.htm)

> I'd like to get a feeling for how ConTeXt fits in with TeX and its related programs.

I would say that it (mis)uses pdfTeX to much greater extent than LaTeX
does, although LaTeX has much more packages and much more text
editors/magazines support/use LaTeX. ConTeXt is a kind of
revolutionair. It goes to the very limits / uses the newest
technologies / might be full of bugs (but once reported they usualy
get fixed within a day) / uses consistent layout / is very centralized
(one mailing list where the author himself is active) / users'
requests are often fullfilled (in LaTeX you depend on yourself: you
can make your own package, but can't add some functionality to the
existing core) / has very bad documentation (even though it's dozens
of megabytes, most things are undocumented: people read sources) / if
Hans quits, ConTeXt might die.

It has both its pros and cons ... so take the above words with a
reserve, since I might have too good opinion about it and it's
author[s].

Mojca