Re: ConTeXt terminal - any volunteers for testing?

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

On 2/8/07, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 February 2007 23:36, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> >
> > Instructions for trying it out can be found on the site with a patch itself:
> > http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1654807&group_id=2055&atid=302055
> >
> > One needs a reasonably recent TeX distribution. Now that TeXLive is
> > available (for Debian as well), it should be more straightforward to
> > try it out (half a year ago it wouldn't work on most TeX
> > distributions, as it doesn't work with teTeX either).
>
> My current distribution installs both teTeX and ConTeXt:
>     tetex-context-3.0-18mdv2007.0
>
> Are you saying that this won't work for testing?

Just as wxt probably doesn't work if libraries are too old ...

Hans has implemented quite some new features in ConTeXt on my request,
since performance of the terminal with pre-existing features was
"horrible" (ConTeXt needed approximately 12 minutes to compile 13
plots - if there were more, TeX ran out of memory). Now it's
considerably better (not even comparable to the situation before). It
takes me now 5 seconds to compile 6 plots. When I started using
ConTeXt 3 years ago, 30-40 seconds were needed only for a
"Hello-world" document (without any graphic or whatever other fancy
feature).

(I sometimes have a feeling that the ConTeXt developer has fourty
monkeys hidden somewhere, who do all the coding for him ;)

Theoretically, you can install (only unzip into the tree) the latest
version of Latin Modern and take a version of ConTeXt dated between
November 2006 and 12th January 2007(*), and hope that metapost is not
too old. Older versions are lacking some features and newer versions
require at least pdfTeX 1.40.x, which is not present on teTeX.

But I guess that installing Debian's texlive package (or perhaps
"rpmbuild --rebuild --force http://pmrb.free.fr/texlive/texlive.spm"),
downloading an ISO image from CTAN (you don't even have to install it,
you can run it from [virtual] DVD) or downloading ConTeXt minimals
from http://www.pragma-ade.com/download-1.htm (doesn't need
installation either), should be much easier.

You can try to compile files on
http://dl.contextgarden.net/misc/gnuplot-context.zip with "texexec
filename", but I'm pretty sure that the old teTeX won't do. Here are
some instructions about how to make the recent ConTeXt work on teTeX
3, but you really don't want to go that way
(http://wiki.contextgarden.net/TeTeX_3.0_installation).

Mojca

(*) if you're worried about the very limited range of possible
versions: I'm keeping the version of supporting files synchronized
with ConTeXt (if I request a new feature, I improve the terminal when
that feature is added to ConTeXt), but I did my best to organize the
code in such a way, that there is a well-defined & extensible
interface that shouldn't depend on gnuplot version used.
This means that when I'll add support for transparency or extend
support for palettes/images, new versions of ConTeXt files should
support output of either new or old gnuplot without any problem. (The
two supporting files, esp. t-gnuplot.tex, [will] keep changing over
time, but that shouldn't be a problem.) The only problem would arise
if one would decide to use considerablty newer gnuplot's binary (with
new feature implemented) than the version of ConTeXt supporting files,
but that should not happen (or at least it's straightforward to
install new ones - one only needs to copy them to the proper place).