[ale] CONTeXT and Chemistry links for sharing

[Ed Cashin]

I mentioned on ALE that the CONTeXT macropackage, an alternative to
LaTeX, has chemistry support, but I found some broken links in the
wiki I mentioned, and since it has been over a decade since I was
using the more advanced features of CONTeXT, I asked its principal
creator, Hans Hagen, for more information.

I've quoted some parts of his response below.

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 4:52 AM, Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> wrote:
...
[Ed writes]
>> I hope you are doing very well.  I see from the slides of a
>> presentation you gave in Belgium in 2011 that you have continued to
>> work on the fascinating possibilities in the interplay between TeX and
>> Metapost, and I'm happy to see that.
>
>
> Yes, in fact it goes even further. We started the LuaTeX project which
> brings scripting into the core engine and there has been / is going on a
> complete rewrite of context (called mkiv).
>
> http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/mk.pdf
> http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/hybrid.pdf
> http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/cld-mkiv.pdf
>
> are all examples of the directiosn we move into.
>
>> I just mentioned to someone in the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts mailing
>> list that CONTeXT supports chemistry documents, but I gave a link to
>> this page:
>>
>>   http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Chemistry
>>
>> .... and because of the two broken links near the top and the fact that
>>
>> your 2011 slides mention moving chemistry support into the core (of
>> CONTeXT?) ... I now wonder whether I should have recommended something
>> else.
>
>
> There are probably more broken links on the wiki as Mojca is moving all to a
> new machine.
>
>
>> Do you think there's a better resource I can point out to show folks
>> what CONTeXT can do when used to create documents for Chemistry
>> material?
>
>
> http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/mp-cb-en.pdf
>
> is still valid. Instead of being a module, in context mkiv (which is what
> most users use now) support for chemistry is part of the core and it has
> been rewritten in a combination of lua/mp/tex and as that all integrates
> nicely we get more speed and quality. We want to add some more trickery
...
> We have a pretty active context mailing list (the chemical one is still
> there but never used) with quite some helpful people on it.

-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
  http://noserose.net/e/
  http://www.coraid.com/