Running ConTeXt
The First Document page provides a cursory introduction to typesetting document using ConTeXt. The Context page describes the command-line options in brief. This page provides additional information for command-line options.
--run
Process one or more files; this is the default action and may be omitted.
--autopdf
Reopen the generated PDF file in the system's default PDF file viewer after recompiling a document.
--purgeall
Delete all build artifacts generated during compiling of a document, such as .tuc and .log files.
--path=list
Provide a comma-separated list of paths for ConTeXt to search when processing. For example:
context --path="$HOME/writing/common/styles,$HOME/writing/amazing-novel/styles"
--result
Changes the output document file name. ConTeXt creates the output document file in the current working directory; this option cannot create or move the output document in a different directory. Instead, change the working directory before running ConTeXt and use the --path option to configure where ConTeXt searches for files to process.
--errors
ConTeXt is sometimes quite liberal when it comes to non-syntactical errors in the source files. Missing fonts, missing characters in a font, missing references do not automatically abort a run or exit with a non-successful return value. To report possible issues, either compile with --errors
or use
\enabledirectives [logs.errors]
in the source file. Example:
\starttext %% missing figure \externalfigure [nonexistent] \stoptext
Compiling with context --noconsole --silent --nostatistics file.tex
would result in no output (as well as a successful return value). If, on the other hand, compiled with context --noconsole --silent --nostatistics --errors file.tex
the output would be:
error logging > start possible issues graphics > start missing figures graphics > foo graphics > stop missing figures error logging > stop possible issues
The return value would still be zero (success), though. To have the return value reflect possible found issues, patterns can be used. Example:
\enabledirectives [logs.errors=*]
Alternatively the patterns can be provided as a compile switch --errors='*'
. The quotes are required to prevent shell expansion. With these options, the context
would return 1 (failure) if problems are found.
Note that only some of the problems are reported, some of which might not be critical and other, possibly critical problems, are not detected.