gardener, Interface administrators, Administrators
1,540
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
At the moment, there There is very little not much practical user-visible difference between ConTeXt Mark IV and ConTeXt LMTX, but that is likely to change newer features and further development happen only in the futurelatter, most notably the completely rewritten subsystem for math typesetting.
some fixes and additions
= A short history of ConTeXt =
ConTeXt has been in constant development for nearly three decadessince the 1990s. It should not come as a surprise that over that time period, many things have changed. This page is a quick overview of the history of ConTeXt.
= Prehistory: ConTeXt 'Mark I' =
ConTeXt started as a macro package to aid in automating the typesetting of educational publications, with strong emphasis of easy on ease of use as it targeted users that were not versed in TeX macro programming. Those first few years, ConTeXt was an internal tool used by Pragma ADE and its clients.
While the source code of ConTeXt has seen a lot of changes over the years, many of the early design decisions and features are still present in the newest releases:
* A multi-lingual interface
* A bias toward typesetting rather than portability of document sources
* A feature set that is geared toward towards educational publishing, with early support for floats, columns, page composition, referencing, graphics, colours colors and external fonts
* A command-line tool set to simplify the compilation process
This prehistoric version of ConTeXt was using Knuth's Knuth’s TeX82 as the underlying compilation engine. Pragma ADE used the commercial Y&Y TeX distribution and the free IBM-PC port emTeX.
= ConTeXt [[Mark II]] =
* Major features that were added or improved: Unicode, OpenType fonts, inline MetaPost graphics, HTML export, direct XML processing, Lua interface to typesetting
* ConTeXt Mark IV was released in both 'current' (stable) and 'beta' (development) versions.
ConTeXt Mark IV is stable and still used as a production tool in many places.
In 2019, work started on a new compilation engine: LuaMetaTeX. Once again, Pragma ADE was a driving force in its development, and the many internal engine changes resulted in the desire for a new major ConTeXt release: ConTeXt LMTX.
After about a year of internal rewrites, this has now become the official development version of ConTeXt. In 2022, the source code of LuaMetaTeX was added to the distribution to make it self-sustained.
For now at least, ConTeXt LMTX is distributed only in a 'latest' version, as there is no stable release yet.
