[XeTeX] ConTeXt, luaTeX...

[Wolfgang Schuster]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 10:40:25 +0100
Gour <ggdasa at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?

You don't have to car about this point in ConTeXt, the interface to
access the fonts is the same with all TeX drivers, the only difference
is sometimes the way to give the font names, luaTeX prefers at the
moment the real file names, this did also work with XeTeX
but you can now also use the font names.

> > 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?

It is easier tu update, just one package and you don't need any extra
packages/modules in your document except the bib module.

> >   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 is now Mark III, pdfTeX will be replaced with luaTeX (pdfTeX 2)
in a few years.

> > 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?

The changes between Mark II and Mark IV happening behind the secenes
and you should't notice it, the one difference in most cases is the
different and better access to fonts.

> Thank you for reply.
>
> Sincerely,
> Gour

Welcome to ConTeXt.

Wolfgang