Re: [AUCTeX] ConTeXt MkIV Support

[Tobias Berndt]

> You could also use yasnippet ...
... I didn't know YASnippet---cool: thanks for this info!

> Familiarity leads to popularity (relative poplarity, of course, since out 
> there, it's still Word that Rules Them All™) ...
... maybe it depends to what level you need to work with such text tools in 
professional ways and how high is the standard set in respect to the results. 
Just for my private live, I probably would have been stayed with XeTeX; it is 
easy to use and can do wonderful things. Since I'm writing technical 
documentations every day and my company pays attention for 
typesetting/typography things of PDFs and their interactive contents and our 
outputs has to be perfect XML as an online help and all the work has to be 
structured in a reasonable way and have to be done in a reasonable time => 
ConTeXt came into considerations; and we discovered so much more in it, to make 
our working life in an editorial environment much easier! And that leads me to 
the conclusion: Professionals as publishing companies, editorial services, 
technical writers &c.pp. who worked with LateX before should take a look to 
ConTeXt to test, how could ConTeXt pay advantages to their work live.

> \startblabla
> \startitem First \stopitem
> \startitem Second \stopitem
> \startitem Third \stopitem
> \stopblabla

>I'm sorry, but that's just horrible
... yes, it certainly is! But, you will use these all closing tags only if you 
want to have perfect XML output. In case, you just want to have perfect PDFs 
and standard (X)HTML, you would use simply:

> \startblabla
> \item First
> \item Second
> \item Third
> \stopblabla

as I said: It depends strongly to what you want. For PDF only using, you'll 
find ConTeXt very similar to plainTeX, kind of monolithic, no packages 
necessary, clear, easy and intuitive ... sometimes you can guess the right 
command/structure.

> Ok, my apologies for the rant... :/
NoT a problem at all!


ALOHA, tobber






Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Tobias Berndt
Technischer Redakteur

baramundi software AG
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-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Joost Kremers [mailto:address@hidden
Gesendet: Montag, 5. September 2016 10:47
An: Tobias Berndt <address@hidden>
Cc: Mosè Giordano <address@hidden>; auctex <address@hidden>
Betreff: Re: [AUCTeX] ConTeXt MkIV Support


On Fri, Sep 02 2016, Tobias Berndt wrote:

> It's a petty and I have no idea why TeX users not realize that ConTeXt
> MkIV is something like the TeX of the 21. century (even Donald Knuth
> recommends it :)! It is modern, more elegant and logical in writing
> code and supports real XML en passant.

I guess that has to do with familiarity. People hear of LaTeX and often think 
that the term 'TeX' is just a synonym or short-hand for it. I suspect only the 
technically inclined only ever get to the point where they hear about ConTeXt.

Familiarity leads to popularity (relative poplarity, of course, since out 
there, it's still Word that Rules Them All™), and that leads to many LaTeX 
packages, which are generally not compatible with ConTeXt, and many journals 
offering a LaTeX template but not a ConTeXt template.

Which in turn will keep even many technically inclined from switching to 
ConTeXt.


On Mon, Sep 05 2016, Tobias Berndt wrote:
> Since ConTeXt IV can things a lot better for a direct XML export, many
> structures need to be closed after using, e.g.
> instead the command \section{Headline} we need:
>
> \startsection[
>   reference=sec:hd,
>   title={Headline },
>   ]
>
> \stopsection
>
> and that's a kind of cumbersome ... and it would be a big help to have
> a nice shortcut to do it.

You could also use yasnippet for this sort of thing, of course. I do quite a 
few LaTeX constructs with yasnippet instead of using the shortcuts provided by 
AUCTeX, because typing a few letters and then hitting TAB is usually quicker 
for me.

> Or, if you want to use ConTeXts proper XML export, you should edit a
> list
>
> \startblabla
> \startitem First \stopitem
> \startitem Second \stopitem
> \startitem Third \stopitem
> \stopblabla

I'm sorry, but that's just horrible. There's a reason why I hate XML with a 
vengeance and unnecessary verbosity is a big part of that. I don't see any 
reason why a *source* format should have that kind of verbosity. After all, 
programs such as Pandoc manage to convert Markdown into proper XML 
successfully, and Markdown is much less verbose than even LaTeX.

Ok, my apologies for the rant... :/

--
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments