Visual Debugging

< Inside ConTeXt | Visuals >

There's a whole lot of commands that help you analyzing and debugging your ConTeXt documents. Most of them start with \show... or \trace.... While \showsomething is a command that immediately inserts something, \tracesomethingtrue or ...false is a switch that influences the behaviour of some other commands. You can check the setting with \iftrace.... In the following we leave out the boolean value (true or false).

Unordered

\tracefiles : ?

\tracepositions : ?

\traceposstring : ?

\traceboxplacement : ?

\traceotr : output routine?

Layout

\showlayout : add four pages that show margins, layout sizes etc.

\showsetups : type a list of all defined sizes (variables) and their values

\showmakeup : ?

\showframe : ?

Grid, Layers and Column Sets

\tracelayers : show boxes of layers

\tracecolumnset : ?

\tracetextareas : ?

\showgrid : make line grid visible

\tracegridsnapping : ?

Tables

\tracetables : ?

\traceTABLE : ?

\tracetabulate : ?

Math

\tracemathtrue : show the layout boxes for left, middle, or right-aligned formulas.

\tracemathcommand : ?

\tracemathcollection : ?

\tracemathsymbol : ?

\tracemathcharacter : ?

Bookmarks and References

\tracebookmarks : ?

\tracelinenotes : ?

\tracereferences : ?

\tracelabels : ?

Fonts and Type

\showbodyfont : actual bodyfont family with all variants

\showbodyfontenvironment : draws a table that shows which point sizes match the relative sizes

\showsymbolset[symbolset name] : shows all the symbols within a given symbol set

\showsymbolset[navigation 1]

\showcharacters : list of available chars of actual bodyfont encoding (approx. 4 pages)

\showmathcharacters : list of all the available math (non-alphabetical) characters available in math, now including all the AMS characters

\showaccents : shows A-Z and a-z with all available accents

\showstruts : display struts (invisible placeholders for proper minimum line heights)

(Make a better, slightly more complex example.)

\setupframed[framecolor=gray]
\showstruts
This will display \strut struts.\crlf
Frame with struts: \framed{xxx}\crlf
And frame without them: \framed[strut=no]{xxx}