3,897
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
add some links
This prehistoric version of ConTeXt was using 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ConTeXt Mark II is now obsolete and no longer actively maintained.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 [[LMTX ]] =
In 2019, work started on a new compilation engine: LuaMetaTeX (see this [https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hagen-lmtx.pdf article]). 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.
At the moment, there is very little practical user-visible difference between ConTeXt Mark IV and ConTeXt LMTX, but that is likely to change in the future.
For now at least, ConTeXt LMTX is distributed only in a 'latest' version, as there is no stable release yet. See [[Installation]] if you want to try it out yourself! [[Category: Development]]
