5th ConTEXt Meeting: Bassenge, Belgium, September 19–24, 2011


New proposals should be addressed to Taco Hoekwater.

Hans Hagen, Netherlands

The state of XML and XHTML export

At last years conference the first version of the export backend has been shown. In the meantime this mechanism has been extended to make generating ebook (epub archives) more easy. Although math can be exported reasonably well, we saw reason to review this mechanism and we use the opportunity to introduce some extra structure in coding math. All this makes it possible to code documents in TeX and provide a version for print (pdf) as well as runtime rendering (xhtml).

In this presentation the current state of the exporter will be demonstrated and discussed. Users are invited to express their wishes (and take examples) so that we can set some objectives for future versions.

MathML, an update

Support for MathML has been built in ConTeXt for over a decade. The interpreter and renderer has been adapted to upgrades in the standard. In the meantime we can also export presentational MathML and has been adapted (provisionally) to MkIV. In the process of upgrading some math mechanisms we (Aditya and Hans) are keeping an eye on MathML too. One of the objectives is to get both ways of rendering in sync as much as possible. Of course it goes without saying that Unicode Math plays an important role in this.

Even if you never encode in MathML and/or Unicode Math, it might of of interest to see how the Web influences the way aspects of ConTeXt evolve.

MetaPost, how we adapt

In MkIV we already use some of the new features introduced in MPlib and in metafun we had adapted some extensions to used some of them. Last year the metafun extensions have been upgraded completely and some new functionality has been added. Now that the latest MPlib has dropped some rather strict limitations in the upper bounds of numbers we can more conveniently use MetaPost for drawing graphs and visualizing data.

(One aspect that we can discuss into this context is namespaces.)

Adapting the rendering

In MkIV the structure related code provides a bit more control over the final rendering. There are more hooks and as (additional user) information is carried around you can do more advanced things than before.

Sorting registers

The sorter in MkIV can be tuned for specific purposes by using specific properties of characters. An example of specific demand is sorting of Korean and this can serve as an example. In this perspecive we can discussion how we need to deal with a mix of languages (cultural aspects).

Widgets (and pdf trickery)

This can be a discussion session: what more do we need (we can use swf as an example of recent extensions). To what extend do we need to adapt to developments in pdf.

Taco Hoekwater, Netherlands

Using large numbers in MetaPost

MetaPost version 2.0 will allow users to use a much large range and precision for numerical values. The talk + workshop will explain how that extension is done and what the implications are for writing MetaPost image code.

Publishing ConTeXt modules revisited

The modules section of contextgarden.net will be completely different by the time of the meeting. The new version will make use of the infra- structure that is offered by http://tlcontrib.metatex.org. In the process, new features will be added also. This talk will explain how to use the new system both for uploading and for downloading ConTeXt modules.

External lua modules in luatex

Since quite some time already, luatex supports loading externally compiled lua modules. In the future, we even plan to move some of the core lua libraries into dynamically loaded external modules, for instance the 'fontloader'. Why and how this will happen is the topic of this presentation.

Luigi Scarso, Italy

Extending ConTeXt with GraphicMagick: When bitmap beats vector

OpenType Concrete Fonts with MFlua

Tomas Hala, Czech Republic

Migration to ConTeXt?

A human is dependent on his environment. What will happen when he leaves it? After a lot of years spent in LaTeX civilisation, author decided to fly the track and tried ConTeXt for book publishing.

He would like to share his first experience, i.e. feelings (positive, of course), reasons, problems, solutions, searching through documentation, confusions, etc., which among other things might become feedback useful for writing documentation.

The talk will touch everything necessary for typesetting books, e.g., layout setup, grid, fonts maintenance, paragraph alignment, floating objects, language settings... etc. For simplyfing the typesetter's work, some improvements will be proposed.

Thomas Schmitz, Germany

xml in ConTeXt mkiv - tutorial for beginners

xml is a markup language which has become a standard for storing information of all sorts. Its general features are easy to learn, it is structured in a very intuitive and logical way, and it can be used for many different purposes. I got interested in using xml as an input format for ConTeXt after listening to a tutorial Hans gave at the first ConTeXt meeting in 2007, and have since begun to write a number of my documents in xml. The interesting thing is that with xml, you can use and process your documents in many different ways: it is straightfoward to produce different media (web page, e book, or good old pdf), and get different output from the same input file. This tutorial is meant for beginners who have not been using xml at all or not intensely. It will give you a very brief introduction to the language itself and then show you how to process xml input files with ConTeXt mkiv.

Presentations in xml with the simpleslides module

This is a presentation which will showcase an application of what we've seen in the tutorial: presentations for talks are information which is ideal to have in xml format. From the same input file, you can generate the slides, a manuscript for the speaker, handouts, or web pages which present a simplified version of the slides. I will show how I use xml and ConTeXt style sheets to achieve this. And of course, I will be using the simpleslides module which Aditya and have been developing in the past years.

Typesetting an Edited Volume with ConTeXt

This is a very practical presentation of what it means to use ConTeXt for a collaborative volume. I have just finished editing such a volume for a German publisher (it may be out by the time the conference starts). I want to show the setup of such a volume as a ConTeXt project, but in particular, I want to focus on the process of collaborating with users on quite different levels of computer skills. If you're really lucky, I will manage to tell you about my adventures with technological troglodytes without breaking down in tears!

Ulrik Vieth, Germany

OpenType math fonts

Jano Kula, Czech Republic

ConTeXt XML processing

Jean-Michel Hufflen, France

Bibliography tools and ConTeXt/LuaTeX

First, we recall the successive steps of the task performed by a bibliography processor such as \BibTeX. Then we show how this modus operandi has been adapted by tools such as the packages \packagename{natbib}, \packagename{jurabib}, \packagename{biblatex}. We also explain the advantages and drawbacks of using other processors like Biber or Ml\BibTeX. The sections of this talk are the same than in the talk that will be given in TUG 2011, but is adapted to \ConTeXt and Lua\TeX\ users.

Alan Braslau, France

graphics, in particular plotting data

John Haltiwanger, The Netherlands

The Markdown module and the beauty of pre-formats

Though the xml and xhtml export functionality lowers the barriers to using Context as a standard input for multi-output typesetting, there are strong reasons to still consider using a pre-format such as Markdown while writing. This presentation will focus on the capacities of Markdown, how it integrates with Context using Hans' new m-markdown module, and the future of pre-formats as I see it.