ConTeXt and LaTeX by authoritative figure
mohbana
as the title reads, i am looking for a unbiased comparison of the two
preferably by authoritative figure in the LaTeX community.
i'm considering the move to context as i might pursue postgraduate
study and i've heard that context is "better at dealing with large
documents". i've been using latex for about two years now, so i'm
quiet accustomed to it. it'd be great if someone would do a thorough
comparison between the two with the theme being a dissertation. does
anyone have a document which makes a thorough comparison between the
two? and finally is there a ConTeXt book - that is purchasable.
David Kastrup
> as the title reads, i am looking for a unbiased comparison of the two
> preferably by authoritative figure in the LaTeX community.
Authoritative figures need to invest so much time into their system of
choice that they don't get around to looking at other systems...
--
David Kastrup
Tim Arnold
news:c434b3ef-c96d-4e90...@d45g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
I'm not an authoritative figure, but I do use pdfLaTeX to produce books on
the order of thousands of pages with indexes over a hundred pages. No
problems with books of that size.
--Tim Arnold
Luis Rivera
> hi,
>
> as the title reads, i am looking for a unbiased comparison of the two
> preferably by authoritative figure in the LaTeX community.
> does
> anyone have a document which makes a thorough comparison between the
> two?
You may be causing a holy war here :o)
If you already handle LaTeX, I'd suggest you stick to it, if you want
to have your paper on time. Learning a new system is too expensive,
IMHO, if you want to have your stuff done.
Besides, with PDFLaTeX you still will have TeX generated PDFs. So I'd
say stay where you are, in the meantime.
Good luck.
Aditya Mahajan
> hi,
>
> as the title reads, i am looking for a unbiased comparison of the two
> preferably by authoritative figure in the LaTeX community.
I am not an authoritative figure in either Latex or Context, but I have
experience with both Latex and Context. However, I am biased towards
Context, so take the remarks here with a pinch of salt.
> i'm considering the move to context as i might pursue postgraduate
> study and i've heard that context is "better at dealing with large
> documents". i've been using latex for about two years now, so i'm
> quiet accustomed to it. it'd be great if someone would do a thorough
> comparison between the two with the theme being a dissertation. does
> anyone have a document which makes a thorough comparison between the
> two?
You do not say which field you are working in. Is there any latex package
which is essential for your work? If so, the first thing that you need to
check is if that functionality is available in Context. Changes are, that
it is, but it better to check that early.
In terms of the strengths for creating and managing large documents, I
would say that both Context and Latex are almost the same, with Context
being marginally better (better support for conditional compilation,
figure databases, etc). But the difference is minuscule, and does not
warrant changing to Context. Both have extensive support for maths,
floats, tables, automatic numbering, cross referencing, hyperlinks,
bibliography etc. Context is slightly better when it comes to floats,
latex is slightly better in math and bibliography, other things are
roughly the same. If you write your documents in a logical manner, the
markup for latex and context will be almost the same.
There are two areas where latex and context differ: (i) if you want to
change the look and feel of your documents, and (ii) if you want to write
macros or environments that do something non-trivial.
You can change the style of the document in both latex and context, but
IMO context provides a cleaner and a consistent interface. Part of the
reason is that context was designed with the aim of being easier to modify
and part of the reason is that almost 99% of code in context is written by
one person, so there is consistency in design. Consistency is important,
because it makes it easier to remember the syntax of different commands.
In latex, each package uses a slightly different syntax, and you always
need to refer to the user-guide.
In latex there are many packages for typesetting according to the style of
publishers, journals, and universities. In context, there are very few
such styles. If the publisher or the journal provides the style and layout
guidelines, it is relatively easy to write a style file; but it does
require you to do some extra work.
When it comes to writing your own macros, I find context to be vastly
superior to latex. Context provides an easy to use programming API, which
is well documented. Recently, context has moved to luatex, which allows
you write macros using a proper programming language (lua) instead of tex.
Context has a considerably smaller user-base than latex. Although there is
good support in the form of a helpful mailing list, chances of finding a
context expert in your university are slim. Context also has poorer
support from other software (e.g., lilypond, xfig, etc).
In conclusion, context does provide some benefits over latex in managing
large documents, but they are not the clinching factor. If you will be
writing part of your own style file, or if you will be writing some
non-trivial macros, then consider Context.
> and finally is there a ConTeXt book - that is purchasable.
No. And from what I understand, there will not be one anytime soon. There
are, however, quite extensive manuals: a beginner's manual, a user manual,
a metafun manual, a widgets manual, a flowchart manual, a mathml manual, a
columns manual, a figure database manual, a grid manual, amongst others.
Aditya
Robin Fairbairns
>I am not an authoritative figure in either Latex or Context, but I have
>experience with both Latex and Context. However, I am biased towards
>Context, so take the remarks here with a pinch of salt.
i'm quite capable of spotting where salt needs adding (not a lot, in
all honesty), but i can also see that you've provided a useful basis
for a faq answer comparing the two systems.
if i try to fashion something (written by a latex user on the basis of
your input), may i pass it by you before publishing?
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge
Luis Rivera
> Aditya Mahajan <adi.maha...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> >I am not an authoritative figure in either Latex or Context, but I have
> >experience with both Latex and Context. However, I am biased towards
> >Context, so take the remarks here with a pinch of salt.
>
> i'm quite capable of spotting where salt needs adding (not a lot, in
> all honesty), but i can also see that you've provided a useful basis
> for a faq answer comparing the two systems.
>
To add some spice, please notice
1. ConTeXt runs as a series of scripts, so you never make a direct
call to TeX (AFAIK). I've tried it on WinXP, and the scripts fail
badly on me. (La)TeX on the other hand doesn't depend strictly on
external batch files, so even as you may still automatize several
calls to TeX/bibTeX/makindex, you may still make direct calls to the
typesetter; it seems to me that it is more portable than ConTeXt.
2. There are not as many external tools capable of handling ConTeXt
markup (conversions, preprocessors, etc.) as with LaTeX.
3. If you are really used to LaTeX's API (sort of ;-), you may find
ConTeXt's style confusing (and viceversa). Divergence in font handling
is one thing I find confusing, for instance.
IIRC, these were the main reasons why I decided to stick to LaTeX, in
the hope that the API will also improve with the introduction of
LaTeX3 on top of LuaTeX.
Good luck,
Luis.
Aditya Mahajan
Definitely. Feel free to email me offline if you want me to elaborate on a
particular aspect of ConTeXt.
Aditya
Aditya Mahajan
> On 24 Iun, 07:15, r...@cl.cam.ac.uk (Robin Fairbairns) wrote:
>> Aditya Mahajan <adi.maha...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> I am not an authoritative figure in either Latex or Context, but I have
>>> experience with both Latex and Context. However, I am biased towards
>>> Context, so take the remarks here with a pinch of salt.
>>
>> i'm quite capable of spotting where salt needs adding (not a lot, in
>> all honesty), but i can also see that you've provided a useful basis
>> for a faq answer comparing the two systems.
>>
>
> To add some spice, please notice
>
> 1. ConTeXt runs as a series of scripts, so you never make a direct
> call to TeX (AFAIK). I've tried it on WinXP, and the scripts fail
> badly on me.
Yes, you do need to have ruby (and earlier Perl) installed to run all the
helper scripts that come with Context. So, installing context on windows
can involve some extra work. However, if you do have ruby installed, the
scripts work fine.
> (La)TeX on the other hand doesn't depend strictly on
> external batch files, so even as you may still automatize several
> calls to TeX/bibTeX/makindex, you may still make direct calls to the
> typesetter; it seems to me that it is more portable than ConTeXt.
In principle, it is possible to call context directly from the command
line. In some sense, in context the ruby scripts are equivalent to
pdflatex/latex "programs" in latex: they call pdftex with appropriate
flags. The difference is that pdflatex/latex is distributed as a binary,
while context scripts are distributed as ruby file and most things are
transitioning to lua now.
Which brings me to another point. Luatex also embeds a lua interpreter, so
it is possible to run lua scripts through luatex (actually texlua, but
that can just be a symlink to luatex). So, you need not install any other
scripting language in order to run context helper scripts. A lot of
scripts have moved to lua now: the equivalent of texhash, latex, makeindex
are done in lua now.
> 2. There are not as many external tools capable of handling ConTeXt
> markup (conversions, preprocessors, etc.) as with LaTeX.
This is true to the most part. For converters tex4ht does a reasonable job
with context files. There is also pandoc which can convert from html ->
makrdown -> context.
> 3. If you are really used to LaTeX's API (sort of ;-), you may find
> ConTeXt's style confusing (and viceversa).
Vice-versa :)
> Divergence in font handling is one thing I find confusing, for instance.
One thing that I like about the font handling in context is that a large
part of the font handling API is independent of the engine: the process of
getting a type1 font to work with pdftex, a truetype or otf font to work
with xetex, and a otf font to work with luatex is quite similar. I do not
know the details of writing font support for latex, and how does it
compare across different engines.
> IIRC, these were the main reasons why I decided to stick to LaTeX, in
> the hope that the API will also improve with the introduction of
> LaTeX3 on top of LuaTeX.
I feel that latex made many design decisions to gain performance (like
undefining \title and \author immediately after \maketitle), and many
macros were difficult before etex (verbatim code in footnotes). Latex3
will not need to worry about these, and since it is designed afresh the
API will hopefully be better. I already like the programming API as well
as the user interface used in Morten Høgholm packages (xfrac and mh
bundle, not breqn which I find too complicated to understand).
Aditya