[XeTeX] ConTeXt, luaTeX...

[Gour]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:46:58 +0100
Arthur Reutenauer <arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org> wrote:

>   Definitely.  You have to give the "--xetex" (or "--xtx") switch to
> texexec to use the XeTeX engine.  Some messages from ConTeXt may look
> funny right now, due to some magic it does for font lookup (many blank
> lines are output to the terminal at some point, but you shouldn't
> worry about that).

Thank you for the above info. Very good news ;)

>   As someone who has watched the recent development of both these
> programs, I would say "most certainly not"; they have quite different
> goals 

Hmm, can you elaborate a bit on this? 

By naive looking at both, I have  a feeling that both are supposed to make
Unicode in Tex much easier, and, iirc, luatex is supposed to have easy(ier)
font handling similar to XeTeX?

> I think the main challenge for now is for macro packages  to really support 
> all those engines.

This is clear advantage of ConTeXt being monolithic in comparison with
LaTeX?

>   I'm not sure what you mean with "ConTeXt-ng".  "Mark IV" is the
> nickname for ConTeXt when you run it with the LuaTeX engine; 

I was thinking about that one.

>  (the XeTeX side of ConTeXt  was supposed to be called "Mark III", but Hans Hagen 
> never used the name so I stopped advertising it ;-) 

Didn't know that.

> Mark II will probably be there forever, but the active
> ConTeXt development will focus on Mark IV.

So, 'old' ConTeXt docs will be processable with Mark IV?

Thank you for reply.

Sincerely,
Gour