ConTeXt

betreft: niet vormgegeven HTML versie van een folder
auteur : PRAGMA Advanced Document Engineering
zie ook: www.pragma-ade.nl

ConTeXt can be used to typeset complex and large collections of documents, like educational materials, user guides and technical manuals. Such documents often have high demands regarding structure, design and accessibility. Easy maintenance, reuse of content and typographic consistency are important prerequisites. ConTeXt is developed for those who are responsible for producing such documents. ConTeXt is written in the typographical programming languages TEX. For using ConTeXt, no TEX-programming skills and no technical background are needed. Some basic knowledge of typography and document design will enable you to use the full power of ConTeXt. ConTeXt is parameter driven and the user interface supports several languages, like english, german and dutch. This means that those less familiar with the english language can choose the interface that suits them best. Of course ConTeXt can typeset in many languages. Originally ConTeXt was written as tool for writing complex, constantly changing and extensive educational documents. Although much functionality originates there, ConTeXt has proven to be quite suitable to perform many other complex typesetting tasks. Some features are:

automatic placement of figures, formulas, tables and other kind of floating bodies
automatic generation of lists of abbreviations, synonyms, and whatever needs to be sorted
automatic numbering of footnotes
adapting footers and headers to the current page content
extensive formatting of itemizations in more levels
consistent typesetting of legends to formulas
maintaining several registers, if needed with extensive interactive support
extensive cross referencing capabilities
generating lists of used figures, tables, formulas and more
forcing rigourous consistency in emphasizing parts of the text
managing documents in a project environment
automatic placement of marginal notes
typesetting in more than one column
identifying textual elements in such a way that they can be hidden, moved and reused when needed (questions, answers, definitions, etc.)
using text in more that one document, if needed with a different layout
automatic hyphenation of words as well as adapt to language specific typographic needs
inclusion of illustrations in standardized formats from other applications
using color
easy change of layout, while guarding consistent typography
providing multiple tables of contents and lists, at all levels, to provide optimal accessibility
automatic numbering of definitions, lemmas and other structural components
automatic numbering of figures, tables, and other floating bodies
automatic makeup of tables and formulas

ConTeXt supports the PDF format and is able to directly produce highly interactive PDF files, using PDFTEX. All cross references are automatically converted to hyperlinks. Such documents can be viewed and consulted with Acrobat. ConTeXt can provide all kind of navigational aids, that can be activated without programming. Electronic versions of documents thereby become very useful in educational settings. The potentials of PDF is available to the user: complex forms and JavaScript's are no problem for ConTeXt. PRAGMA ADE has developed ConTeXt in-house mainly to suit its own and customers wishes concerning developing educational documents. Flexibility in layout, reuse of content, and maintenance are keywords. For more information and examples we refer to www.pragma-ade.nl.