On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm <hra...@fiee.net>wrote:
> Am 2009-05-24 um 19:17 schrieb John Haltiwanger: > > 1) Can environment files be used across documents, or is it generally >> understood that every ConTeXt document requires its own environment >> formatting? (The latter is the view of someone on c.t.t, who said his >> perception of ConTeXt was that it was for typesetting individual documents >> and had less application beyond that domain.) >> > > Normally you use environment files for coherent projects (magazines, books) > or sets of similar documents (letters, presentations). > > The difference in usage between a LaTeX document class and a ConTeXt > environment is neglectable IMO. The real difference is that most LaTeX users > just *use* some document class unchanged, because LaTeX doesn't encourage > defining your own, while there are nearly no ready-to-use ConTeXt > environments available and most ConTeXt users want write their own anyway. > > For one-off documents I put everything in one file (and perhaps copy setup > bits from other one-off files or environments). > > If *I* require a special layout for a single document, I normally use > InDesign. The effort of "programming" a setup or an environment pays off > only if you use it more often IMO. > These paragraphs seems to contradict. ConTeXt is useful if you use an environment more than once, but there are no ready-to-use ConTeXt environments. I am not averse to rolling my own, I am just confused why, if environments are so powerful and flexible (flexible meaning one can easily change things, unlike document classes), there are no pre-rolled environments available. I am thinking here of standardized thesis environments for universities, or a nice letter environment to demonstrate the beauty of TeX. 2) What is the state of XML output for ConTeXt files? I have to say I will > find it hard to justify using TeX for documents if it means they are not > translatable to XML easily. I'm also interested in any RDF support ConTeXt > might have. > XML is no target format for any TeX implementation. > XML is a source format, and a good one if you want to process (typeset) it > with ConTeXt (and perhaps make HTML from the same source). > > What do you mean with RDF? This one?: http://www.w3.org/RDF/ > Or did you mean RTF? Yes, I meant RDF. XML is a very important format. I find it odd that TeX can generate PDF but cannot output simple XML. So in order to have a semantical document I must write it in XML and then process it with ConTeXt? Is the capacity there (through LuaTeX perhaps) to write an XML generator? While I would expect the reasons for wanting XML output would be obvious, a concrete example is that at least one journal is deprecating LaTeX because it wants to archive all of its articles in XML. Regards, John C. Haltiwanger
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