Granthinām

For a couple of days I am now playing around with ConTeXt and I have to say it’s really great. ConText (developer’s homepage) is, like LaTeX, a macro package for the extension of Donald Knuth’s original (Plain)TeX and so could be seen somewhat as an alternative to LaTeX. It makes use of the Pdf producing engine Pdftex (this team is designated as “ConTeXt Mark II”), but is also able to employ the enhanced, up-to-date Unicode capable engines XeTeX and LuaTeX. Seen from this point ConTeXt is an application belonging to the category “Pdf software”. ConTeXt is to my experience lean, effective and always just on the point. The LuaTeX format files for LaTeX have become available lately (see here), but if you really want to roll LuaTeX incl. working hyphenation etc. it’s better to work with ConTeXt – as a matter of fact it was developed very closely to LuaTeX (this couple is designated as “Mark IV”). With the LuaTeX engine it’s possible to set up customs implementations through Lua code which makes ConTeXt ultra versatile (see here).

Mk IV is available through TeX Live, but there is also a lean distribution, ConTeXt Minimals.  Except for a few third party modules (see here) everything is integrated which has its advantages. A challenge for switchers is the fact that ConTeXt seems to be even more arcane than LaTeX. But there is some info especially for LaTeX leavers (see here, here, and here), the ConTeXt guys are running a wiki named ConTeXt garden which helps to establish you, and there is the seems to be newbie friendly mailing list here. The are many excursions, references and manuals by the programmers to be found on the net. A useful resource is the the page context-xml.

On the first run of MkIV on Tex Live 2009 you have to integrate the font directories first (on Linux: export OSFONTDIR=”/usr/share/fonts/;/usr/local/share/fonts” or similar) and to rebuild the LuaTeX cache with: luatools –generate. Now you can process a basic document test.tex like: \starttext Hello world! \stoptext with context test.tex into a Pdf document. Welcome to ConTeXt!

Next there has to be a shopping list of basic features:

• For enabling Unicode input encoding you have to give a \enableregime[utf], the right language/hyphenation option is switched with \mainlanguage[de] resp. [en] (see options here)
• The employment of custom fonts has made been easy through the module Simplefonts, a simple \usemodule[simplefonts][size=10pt] or similar together with \setmainfont[xyz] switches it (elements like footnotes are not changed through that, is it that this could be improved or there is a deeper reason for that, but furthermore there has to be a \definesimplefonttypeface[myfont][xyz] and then \setupfootnotes[bodyfont=myfont] – for the page number there has to be given \setuppagenumbering[bodyfont=myfont])
• The whitespace between paragraphases could be manipulated with \setupwhitespace[1.5ex] or something like this (an “ex” is the “high of an x”)
• The interline space could be manipulated simply through \setupinterlinespace[line=1.5\bodyfontsize] or similar
• The Pdf metadata could be passed through with \setupinteraction[state=start, title={My document}, author={me}], a clickable table of contents in blue there you’ll get with \setupcombinedlist[content][interaction=all, color=blue]

That’s great but what’s in here for the philologists? What first caught my attention is the fact that at MkIV there weren’t any problems with multiple combined diacritical marks (Unicode 0300-036F) of the IndUni-H by John Smith (Vedic stuff like r-underdot-macron-acute/grave). I don’t know who made a mistake, but there are still some problems with XeTeX and that font (which is the only free full fledged Helvetica available). Being reliable with minority stuff like this leaves a very confident impression.

Another very interesting development is that of CritTeXt which is planned to be a luxurious functionality for the production of textual editions with ConTeXt. Idris Hamid at the Colorado State University and the Oriental TeX project are the driving force behind CritTeXt. What has been presented at the TUG 2007 talk and that outline of text critical typesetting features (here) looks very promising. Unfortunately that’s all what is on the net towards this and till now I haven’t found out if the project got far enough in the meanwhile to be able to plan with that or even switch over for that. But I’ve been told that everything is going to be implemented into ConTeXt – eat this, Word! Next to the still available TeX critical edition solutions, Ledmac and Ednotes for LaTeX and the Stammvater Edmac for PlainTeX (no, not running with ConTeXt), this could be another chance for getting what I know is the wet dream of many of my peers: parallel typesetting in a critical edition environment. I’ll report further discoveries.