On 1/4/2021 2:02 PM, BPJ wrote:
I understand all that. I just thought that maybe such resources existed
which I didn't know.
While as you say the approaches differ it would be nice to have like a
FAQ "how do you do what LaTeX package X does in ConTeXt?" I guess that
that is what I'm after. Something like a LaTeX <--> ConTeXt Rosetta
stone. Knowing that rather than importing a package I should modify some
command using some options is basic; what one really needs to know is
which specific command to modify using which specific options with which
specific values to do what package X does in LaTeX. If/since it doesn't
exist maybe it would be a good thing if users make it exist. It would
certainly help drawing more proselytes. I'm basically still using only
LaTeX because I know which packages to use to do the things I want.
Perhaps that *is* as good a reason as any to stay with LaTeX but it
shouldn't be a barrier to learning ConTeXt which IME it is.
Often it's better to start from scratch as it might be that the choice
for some solution in one system would be a different one in an other. I
never had to use an office application (word, open office, whatever) but
I'm pretty sure that if one comes from a tex mindset one also looks for
the wrong solutions. (Which probably is why one can sometimes find those
useless ramblings about msword and such among texies: an even little
able user of some word processors knows how to write a letter and
probably could not get it done in tex in a minute, after all it starts
with installation.)
So, I wonder if recipes would work well. (Just like switching from say
lisp to pascal, or even lisp to prolog, or pascal to c# is not a matter
of reading a few page manual.)
To take but one example: when wearing my linguist hat I deal with
obscure scripts and languages, mostly dead languages, which no standard
LaTeX index processor can handle (at least not out of the box) so I have
my pile of Perl hacks which generate indices using Perl's excellent
Unicode capabilities and some excellent modules written by other people.
(I use the same LaTeX packages as everyone else, I just have a homemade
way of going from idx to ind.) The first hurdle to know if/how ConTeXt
might offer a better solution (which it doesn't AFAIK but my own tool
can easily generate ConTeXt markup as well as LaTeX markup should it
come to that) was to find out that indices are called "registers" in
ConTeXt (not too surprising since it is _register_ in Swedish) for
searching for "index" on the ConTeXt wiki finds an error page!
Sure, but when such specialization is needed, any (transition) manual is
kind of tricky. If systems are indeed quite different (and there are
definitely conceptual diferences between latex and context and plain) it
might even be a reason not to look further. That said: there is some
info on how to set up the sorter for different languages.
Admittedly it might be just me: I have a hard time knowing where to look
in the likewise excellent Vim documentation too: what search terms to
use. Finding a LaTeX solution to a problem with Google OTOH usually is
pretty fast done — if you can describe your problem in prose you usually
don't hit a wall.
The good news is that often on this list you get an answer (and
sometimes looking at examples in e.g. the test suite also helps). But
one aspect remains: learning (any) tex takes time. This is compensated
by the fact that you can use it forever as it's unlike to stay (or taken
over by some large company that then ditches it in favour of its own
stuff). Unlearning probably also takes soem time and effort.
And in context one also can be triggered into leanring metapost and lua
so that adds to the burden (but also fun).
With knowledge of TeX basics I did not mean a working knowledge of plain
TeX but the actual basics: reserved characters, syntax, space after a
command is ignored, a blank line makes a paragraph, that sort of things
which are common to all flavors.
It definitely helps to have an idea how tex deals with what you input
and even how it internally works a bit. Just try to get a copy of TeX by
Topic ... a pretty good summary of the basics. And after that the TeX
Book ... just to get the feelling of what world one enters.
Hans
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