First Document
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What is ConTeXt? What can I do with it? Let’s see. Take your favourite text editor, type in the following document and save it as a file hello.tex
.
\starttext Hello World \stoptext
It shows already a ConTeXt essential: everything's between \startsomething and \stopsomething.
If you don't have ConTeXt installed (yet), you can first try out the latest version using the web interface http://live.contextgarden.net.
If you already installed it, you can go to the shell/command line and type in
texexec hello.tex
and now ConTeXt will start. It will give you some output on your terminal
TeXExec | processing document 'hello.tex' TeXExec | no ctx file found TeXExec | tex processing method: context TeXExec | TeX run 1 TeXExec | writing option file hello.top TeXExec | tex engine: pdfetex TeXExec | tex format: cont-en TeXExec | progname: context This is pdfeTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.30.3-2.2 (Web2c 7.5.5) \write18 enabled. %&-line parsing enabled. (c:\context\usr\local\context\tex\texmf-local/web2c/natural.tcx) entering extended mode (./hello.tex ConTeXt ver: 2006.05.14 23:57 fmt: 2006.5.16 int: english mes: english language : language en is active <protectionstate 0> ...
Don’t be worried. This is the way it should look. Once texexec has finished, it will leave behind a file called hello.pdf. Open it and you will see a "Hello world" on a virtual A4 paper and a page number.