[adrianratnapala]

While mentioning ConTeXt, can anyone give me a sell job on when and why it might be nicer than LaTeX?

It's not that I'm super fond of LaTeX, it's just that I assumed its warts were more or less inevitable in a stringy macro framework, and ConTeXt can't avoid that either.

[adiM]

Feature wise, both LaTeX and ConTeXt are similar. Where ConTeXt really shines is the ease of use and consistency of the interface.

1. No need to run `pdflatex; bibtex; pdflatex; pdflatex` multiple times. The wrapper script `context` takes care of that.

2. Easy to add graphic elements to the page and layout in a consistent and _fast_ manner.

3. Export to XML/XHTML/ePub.

4. Can compile XML.

5. Programatically generate documents using a Lua interface (this is different from LuaTeX; ConTeXt has a nice Lua interface called ConTeXt Lua Documents, so it seems that you are writing Lua code rather than a wrapper script).

6 Consistent of interface. See https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4987/why-should-i-be...

[adrianratnapala]

Does #5 get around my worries about a "stringy-marcro-framework"? I.e. when things get too complicated, you can break out to a Heavy Duty (TM) language (aka Lua).

[adiM]

Depends a bit on what you mean by "string-macro-framework". The thing with ConTeXt is that it has a well defined API, so even when you are processing data using macros, it does not feel awkward.

Let me give a few examples of how I use ConTeXt (not necessary with ConTeXt Lua Documents)

1. Create a simple key-value driven interface for "complex" layouts https://adityam.github.io/context-blog/post/exam-coverpage/ This is still a "string-macro-framework", but ConTeXt has enough (and well named!) macros that it almost appears to be a "normal" template language. The code in ERB or other template languages would not be too different.

2. Generate Lab assignments for an undergraduate linear control systems course where the students learn how to interface MATLAB with real-time hardware. We create the lab in Matlab (`.m` file) and convert it to Matlab live script (which is Matlab's version of jupyter notebooks) which the students have to fill in. But, the live script notebooks are not convenient for browsing (say, for students who want to view the lab on their phone). Matlab offers a PDF as well as LaTeX export, which look ugly IMHO. So, we convert the `.m` to XML (Matlab does an XML export), and then use context to convert XML to PDF. The code is written using "stringy-macro-framework" but again the interface is nice enough that it would have looked similar in any other XSLT framework in any high-level language.

3. As an academic, I need to generate various versions of my CV (full publication record, pubs in the last `n` years for various values of `n`, etc.). I store my pubs in an XML file, use the XML parsing lib in ConTeXt to convert the data to Lua tables, and then use ConTeXt Lua Document syntax to generate different versions of my CV (depending on the command line flags to the `context` compiler. Once the data is converted to a Lua table, it is trivial to do things like group pubs by year, group pubs by research areas, etc.

[norswap]

It's generally better designed, but from own experience, harder to actually get something done with unless you are going to learn it from first principles — which hardly anyone does because while simpler than LaTeX it's still has cthulu-esque levels of complexity due to the TeX heritage.

One reason for the practical gap is that there is an order of magnitude more info on LaTeX online. Googling for ConTeXt is a miserable experience and the official documentation is far from enough.

On the other hand, if you do master it — well then it's easier to do the kind of things the OP does, which I think is really impressive.