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= After about a year of internal rewrites, this has become the official development version of ConTeXt LMTX =. In 2022, the source code of LuaMetaTeX was added to the distribution to make it self-sustained.
In 2019, work started on a new compilation engine: LuaMetaTeX (see this [https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40There is not much practical user-1/tb124hagen-lmtx.pdf article]). Once againvisible difference between ConTeXt Mark IV and ConTeXt LMTX, Pragma ADE was a driving force but newer features and further development happen only in its developmentthe latter, and the many internal engine changes resulted in most notably the desire completely rewritten subsystem for a new major ConTeXt release: ConTeXt LMTXmath typesetting.
After about For now at least, ConTeXt LMTX is distributed only in a year of internal rewrites'latest' version, this has now become the official development version of ConTeXtas there is no stable release yet.
At the moment, there is very little practical user-visible difference between ConTeXt Mark IV and ConTeXt LMTX, but that is likely See [[Installation]] if you want to change in the future.try it out yourself!
For now at least, ConTeXt LMTX is distributed only in a 'latest' version, as there is no stable release yet.[[Category: Development]]
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 ]] =
Around 1995, a public release of ConTeXt was made, roughly coinciding with the availability of pdfTeX as underlying compilation engine (although that was not the default compilation engine at the start).
ConTeXt Mark II is now obsolete and no longer actively maintained.
= ConTeXt [[Mark IV ]] =
With the development of the LuaTeX compilation engine (that Pragma ADE was a big part of) and its addition of both the Lua programming language and MetaPost graphics, it became possible to redo quite a lot of the ConTeXt internals, in turn necessitating a new major version.
* All the command-line tools were consolidated into a single subsystem called `mtxrun`
* 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 distributed released in both 'current' (stable) and 'beta' (development) versions.
ConTeXt Mark IV is stable and still used as a production tool in many places.
= ConTeXt Mark IV is stable and still used as [[LMTX]] = In 2019, work started on a new compilation engine: LuaMetaTeX. Once again, Pragma ADE was a production tool driving force in its development, and the many placesinternal engine changes resulted in the desire for a new major ConTeXt release: ConTeXt LMTX.
