I have no experience with TeX or any other typesetting system.
I am going to university soon and have been told that I should learn LaTeX as it will help with bibliographies and essay writing. I am also self employed and would like to generate invoices in the future.
My original intention was just to learn LaTeX, however I found out about ConTeXt and now am a bit confused by the different options!
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different typesetting systems?
Best Answer
It is safe to say that in general ConTeXt focuses a bit more on typography and a bit less on structure than LaTeX. There is quite a lot of functionality to handle page layouts, page arrangements, and page layering, for example.
Some other strong points of ConTeXt:
Multi-lingual interface with support for markup commands in Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Persian and Rumanian.
Although extensibility is offered via a module system, the equivalent functionality of many (if not most) of the commonly used LaTeX packages is built into the ConTeXt core.
ConTeXt’s unified design avoids the package clashes that can happen with LaTeX
Extensive use of key-value setup commands means that defining your own style is quite easy.
ConTeXT has an active mailing list that is closely monitored by the core developers.
ConTeXt integrates a superset of MetaPost called MetaFun which allows the users to use the drawing abilities of MetaPost for page backgrounds and ornaments.
ConTeXt closely follows LuaTeX development.
ConTeXt provides a command-line wrapper script that among other this takes care of setting document modes and making sure that enough typesetting runs are done auomatically to resolve all references correctly.
It is possible to process xml and mathml files directly.