I'd like to define an itemization that has two kinds of items,
representing a dialogue between two people. (One could imagine
extending this to more than two.) I'd like to have something like this:
\startdialogue
\john What did you have for breakfast?
\mary I skipped breakfast today.
\john Oh, why?
\mary Because I wasn't hungry. I was too distraught at what had
happened the previous night.
\stopdialogue
The \john and \mary parts would each be their own paragaphs. The
paragraphs would be colored with different text backgrounds, and joined
up with one another (that is, the blocks of text representing the
paragraphs for the different speakers would be adjacent to one another).
I've tried doing this using \defineparagraphs, \defineframedtext, and
\defineenumerations, but I can't quite get the right effect;
\setupcolors[state=start]
\definetextbackground[john-background][backgroundcolor=green]
\definetextbackground[mary-background][backgroundcolor=red]
\definestartstop[dialogue]
\defineparagraphs[john][before={\starttextbackground[john-background]},after={\stoptextbackground}]
\defineparagraphs[mary][before={\starttextbackground[mary-background]},after={\stoptextbackground}]
Putting
this before the above \start/stopdialogue snippet (suitably enclosed in
\start/stoptext) gives me an error about a missing "}"; I suppose I'm
overlooking something.
An enumeration-based solution would be along these lines:
\defineenumeration
[chat]
\setupenumerations
[chat]
[joinedup,packed]
\define[0]\john{\item John: }
\define[0]\may{\item Mary: }
I can't figure out how to get the textbackgrounds to work here, and
there's a bullet symbol at the beginning of every "dialogue paragraph",
which I'd rather get rid of (and I don't want the indent between the
bullet and the beginning of the text).
A framed-text solution starts to come close:
\defineframedtext[john][frame=off,background=color,backgroundcolor=magenta]
\defineframedtext[mary][frame=off,background=color,backgroundcolor=lightred]
But then the boxed paragraphs are separated from each other by some
vertical whitespace.
Another idea would be to use tables, but I haven't explored that yet.
Any suggestions for how to render "dialogues" as above in ConTeXt?
Thanks,
Jesse
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