9th ConTEXt Meeting: Nasbinals, France, September 14–18, 2015

Abstracts

New proposals should be addressed to Taco Hoekwater or Alan Braslau.

Managing colors

Luigi Scarso and Hans Hagen

If you produce a document for printing a client or printing house can demand (no matter how unreasonable or irrelevant that is) to provide a document in cmyk colors or in gray. In this session we will show some ways to deal with this (semi automatically) in ConTeXt. We will also discuss some conversion methods and their implications on quality.


Ligatures, hyphenation and kerning

Hans Hagen

Although anything is possible concerning ligatures, hyphenation and kerning, some things are hard to support concurrently. One reason is conflicting demands, another is complexity and, of course, performance also plays a role. we will explore some of these issues in this presentation.


Epub: the state of affairs

Hans Hagen

This presentation will be mainly an update of recent developments (especially with respect to CSS support) and a discussion about what more is needed.


Metafun

Hans Hagen

The last year, the low level ConTeXt-Metafun interface was upgraded a bit and as a side effect some new commands were added. These changes has had an impact on the readability of code as well as an improvement in performance. We will show the changes and discuss new possibilities. You can make your wishlist here.


Tokens

Hans Hagen

In this more technical talk I will explain how the new token scanners in luaTeX have influenced the latest version of the TeX-lua interface in ConTeXt. This was a rather massive low-level update. This talk gives you an idea why for a while the beta had some related parsing bugs and why the change was needed.


Hyphenation

Hans Hagen

We are in the process of some changes in the way hyphenation is handled. One reason is that we want to be able to plug in additional methods; another is that the pipeline for further processing of the character stream becomes easier and more predictable. As usual you can bring your wishlist.


Calling MlBibTeX's Functions

Jean-Michel Hufflen

New programs such as LuaTeX allow a cooperation of tasks performed by typesetting functions and other functions, more related to 'actual' programming and written in Lua. Within such a framework, it may be of interest if some tasks performed by our bibliography processor MlBibteX can be called as external functions. We show which tasks and how to organise them.


TeX, ConTeXt, lua, Metapost, XML or several (or all) of the above?

Alan Braslau

ConTeXt is based on luatex, so we have TeX, ConTeXt as well as lua appearing in our code. But ConTeXt also integrates mplib, thus MetaPost syntax also is very present. Furthermore, XML input is also supported, and a ConTeXt workflow can be mostly based on XML.

Much of ConTeXt mixes TeX(ConTeXt) syntax with lua helpers, but this can be mostly transparent to the user. Metapost, too, now can exchange information and make use of lua code for tasks such as the processing of data, and this changes our approach to programming functionality. Indeed, each syntax is well tuned towards its principal task so we need to isolate tasks to environments that are best suited. But how can we do this?

This will be more of a discussion with a follow-up session where solutions will be explored.


Evidence-based hyphenation: a wishlist

Arthur Reutenauer

Hyphenation, or word division, is a central part of any typographical system and has always been close to the heart of TeX programmers. It is also an area that shows a lot a variety, both between languages and between different styles within the same language. In this talk I will show actual examples of this diversity and draw up a list of requirements of what users can expect from ConTeXt.


A short history of the alphabet — and writing

Taco Hoekwater

Before humans invented typing, textual communication was done using handwriting and the occasional bit of chiseling. Our current alphabet did not suddenly appear ready-made, and over time there were also many trends in handwriting style. This is a short overview on how we got from pens and clay tablets to virtual keyboards and computer tablets.


Integrating external bookmarks

Taco Hoekwater

ConTeXt nowadays allows to include the outline (bookmarks) from included PDFs into your own document’s bookmark section. A talk and demonstration that explains the interface and its use.


CLD in Production

Taco Hoekwater

DocWolves B.V. uses ConTeXt to generate PDF for meeting attendees. Recently, we rewrote the system to make use of ConTeXt Lua Documents instead of the more traditional TeX macro based approach.