Basics

Here you find the Basics of ConTeXt document structure and text formatting (because paragraphs, emphasis, verbatims, quotes, etc also contribute to the structure of your documents).

If it helps, there is a Dictionary of typographical terms. There are also a few references to the History of TeX (2007); it would benefit from an update.

Document structure

• ConTeXt Projects

  • Project structure How to split up content and setup.
  • Modes Conditional processing of document

  Titles, Headings, and Sections

  • Titles: sectioning and formatting
  • Table of Contents

  Page Structure

  • Headers and Footers
  • Footnotes, endnotes, and related notes.

• Structure-Related Lists

  • Registers: Indexes and other similar word lists.
  • Bibliography: Referenced documents and in-text citations.

  Referencing

  • References: Automatically referring to pages and labels.
  • PDF Bookmarks and Headers
  • Cross Referencing: Inline text referencing.
  • URL: typesetting of URLs references.

Text formatting

• Basic Text Formatting

  • Fonts/Font Switching, to change font styles (bold, italic, capitalizing, underline, etc.)
  • Alignment
  • Indentation
  • Columns
  • Color
  • Verbatim text
  • Quotes
  • Framed
  • Verse
  • Initials (dropped caps, dropcaps)
    • placement with \placeinitial
    • customization with \setupinitial
  • Symbols
  • Delimiters and breaks (delimiting text, specifying line breaks and page breaks)

• Structured Text

  • Enumerations: Itemizations, itemized lists, and bulleted lists.
  • Descriptions: Lists with text labels, such as definitions.
  • Paragraph Enumeration: Numbered paragraphs.
  • Paragraph Referencing: Number all paragraphs for referencing usage
  • Tables: Different ways to create tables in ConTeXt.

Further reading

Unexpected behavior

If ConTeXt appears to behave in a counterintuitive way, chances are that it’s actually your intuitions that lack calibration.

Visual Debugging

can facilitate tweaking text formatting

Sample documents

a page is used as a central location for these, but there is also a dedicated category (the two should mostly match).

Advanced Document structure

• Hiding Content
• Makeup, allowing for custom and temporary header & footer sections.

Advanced Text formatting

• Hyphenation
• composing characters
• Faking characters
• Compound words
• Cropping text
• Scaling Rotating Mirroring Clipping
• TextBackground (includes underlining)
• Specially Shaped paragraphs
• Widows and orphans control
• Paragraph last line control
• autoinsertnextspace
• setuplocalinterlinespace

TODO: try to follow the structure of part 1 to help orientation. (See: To-Do List)