Re: [NTG-context] Possible inconsistency in the use of paragraphs in ConTeXt

Hi Wolfgang, Am 30.01.2013 um 21:56 schrieb Wolfgang Schuster :

Am 30.01.2013 um 10:00 schrieb Keith J. Schultz :

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Hi Everybody,

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Also, it took me awhile to find the setupwhitespace command, because for me whitespace can be either horizontal or vertical. I think it would be better to rename it to setupparagraphspacing or something like that. Or at least define a synonym for it. This would make things easier for the casual or beginning user.

Which space do you mean in horizontal direction? O.K. Traditionally in typesetting and typography whitespace is just that white space. White space can also be inter-word spacing (horizontal).

Since ConTeXt's setupwhitespace just maps to the parskip-demension I personally find the name confusing. Possible for a synonym one maybe should use then setparagraphskip. This is just a suggestion.

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Maybe I am missing something. Ideas welcome.

The problem with the formatting of paragraphs is that TeX (the engine) has no big concept about paragraphs.

When you want to change the font or color for a paragraph you have to change the values of the document with \setupbodyfont[…] or \setupcolors[textcolor=…]. For local changes for a certain paragraph you can apply these values in a group (to change the color you can just use \startcolor[…] … \stopcolor).

I am aware of this. Since, I noticed the the paragraph(s) environment, I only assume that the functioned similar to the header environments. My mistake! It would have been nice, if ConTeXt had such an environment. I do not know how ConTeXt processes things internally, but since it is a front end, ConTeXt could have the syntactic sugar of a "paragraph"-environment. That is that, while parsing the source it injects groups into the code it outputs for the paragraphs. This would give us then "paragraph"-layout. Naturally, this is not a TeX way, but could be a ConTeXt way.

ConTeXt provides also a paragraph environment but this add only tags when you export the document as XML or create a tagged PDF.

The paragraphs (note the "s") environment has a Hans already mentioned nothing to do with paragraphs, it just puts the content on columns where each column can con tai multiple paragraphs. The name for the environment is misleading because columns is already taken as name.

regards Keith