Welcome to ConTeXt! I'm a relatively new user so my answers will be brief and partial, but I'm sure others will be able to expand on them.
On Tue 13 Dec 2011, Chris Lott wrote: > 1) My work is primarily in the humanities and end-user technologies, > with small amounts of coding. So mathematics isn't an issue. I do a > fair amount of highly academic writing (aka: many sections, citations > [handling this in a sensible way is really important], footnotes) with > the occasional need for charts, graphs, and photos. In other words, > I'm not doing the kind of layout one might associate with InDesign or > the like. I also write many paper letters (personal), poetry, fiction, > essays, and the like. This looks to me like a good use case for ConTeXt. I've used it for a 380-page dissertation with the full complement of academic paraphernalia: footnotes, appendices, table of figures, citations etc. which all worked well for me. I believe that many others are using it for similar work. > 2) That said, I (obviously) have a keen interest in typography, and > that includes wanting to use some particular typefaces... I've paid > good money for many of them, so why not? I've found ConTeXt to be more pleasant than LaTeX for setting up the layout and typography according to my wishes. (When I used LaTeX I generally just went with the default layout and accepted that things would be a little ugly.) ConTeXt is also good about letting you use your own typefaces -- particularly if they're in OpenType format. > 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to > efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting > them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... > is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, > but it would be nice. > > 4) How about X/HTML? this is my lowest level need but, again, it > would be nice. I know that ConTeXt supports direct XHTML output but I'm not sure how mature it is -- I think someone else will be able to provide a more complete answer to this. > So, do you think ConTeXt makes more sense than LaTeX? And *what* is > the deal with xetex? It seems to be the easiest way for accessing all > my fonts, but it also hasn't been updated for years and, since it is > tied to an old version of ConTeXt (as far as I can tell) it doesn't > seem like much of a winner. In short, there are two versions of ConTeXt: Mk II (stable, and frozen for some time now) and Mk IV (actively developed, new betas more than once a month). Mk II can use pdftex or xetex as the engine; Mk IV uses luatex, which provides the ‘it just works’ font handling of xetex alongside a number of other features (chiefly the integration of the lua scripting language). Despite the worries that may be occasionaed by the word ‘beta’, Mk IV is pretty stable and definitely the recommended option these days. Hope this helps! Pont ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
