Dear friends of Omega,

I have made some good progress using Omega under ConTeXt and I would
like to share some of what I have learned with you all, including a
small contribution to the Omega and ConTeXt communities.

First off let me say that I am extremely impressed with the ConTeXt
macropackage. Many of us use TeX and especially Omega not so much for
math typesetting primarily but for superb scholarly typesetting of
books and similar publications. From the point of view of the kind of
_general_ typographical flexibility needed for books and journals
ConTeXt far surpasses LaTeX in my opinion. By `general' I mean not
taking into account mathematics and the niche areas in which LaTeX
excels so well.  LaTeX was originally designed to keep the user from
having to make typographical decisions; this, while arguably good for
publishing articles and reports, really gets in the way for scholarly
publishing purposes (though the wonderful memoir class by Peter Wilson
begins to address this and other issues). ConTeXt on the other hand
aims to give you the broadest possible range of typographic
configurability right out of the box. And it does it in an
across-the-board consistent manner (as opposed to loading possibly
mutually incompatible packages).

Another advantage of ConTeXt is the dynamism of its development team
headed by Hans Hagen. For example, I received quick and positive
feedback to my inquiries about developing native critical edition
capabilities for ConTeXt and I am now working with Hans to help get
this done.

The potential of combining Omega's multilingual capabilities with what
is surely becoming the best desktop publishing solution for scholarly
purposes is truly immense. I strongly urge the developers of Omega to
consider ConTeXt with the same (or perhaps even greater) importance
than is given to LaTeX. ConTeXt is the wave of the future.

The ConTeXt documentation, while thorough, is still a bit obscure so
it takes a while to really get into it. Even now I am still more
comfortable with LaTeX; as with any major software, ConTeXt certainly
takes getting used to. Hopefully someone will publish a "ConTeXt
Companion" or "ConTeXt Unbound" to make the transition easier.  But
for anyone who wants to compare LaTeX and ConTeXt here are a few good
resources:

The now out-of-print 4TeX5 manual has a good comparison of ConTeXt and LaTeX
http://4tex.ntg.nl/4tex5/manual/

LaTeX2ConTeXt.pdf helps in migrating from one to the other:
http://berend.gameren.nl/tex/
http://berend.gameren.nl/tex/LaTeX2ConTeXt.pdf

Finally, Taco Hoekwater's "Comparing ConTeXT and LaTeX"
http://www.ntg.nl/maps/pdf/20_42.pdf

Of course Hans Hagen's latest documentation for ConTeXt itself (which is always being updated) is at
http://www.pragma-ade.com/

A beginners' help page is at
http://home.salamander.com/~wmcclain/context-help.html

Analogous to Lambda, I call ConTeXt for Omega "Gamma", for the third
letter in the greek alphabet. To compile Gamma, make sure a recent
version of ConTeXt is installed and do the following to make the
format file cont-en.fmt:

texexec --make --alone --tex=omega en

(Hopefully in future versions of ConTeXt the format file will be gamma.fmt, gamma.ofmt, or something similar)

To compile a Gamma file, run

texexec --tex=omega my file

=========Omega Fonts: type-om.tex===============

The font selection scheme in ConTeXt is conceptually simple but
practically rather tricky. It's a large cry from NFSS but is much more
configurable (making it more tricky). I am embarassed by the amount of
time it took me to get my own fonts working smoothly. Fortunately Hans
was extremely responsive to all my requests for help and I suspect I'd
still be lost in the labyrinth of ConTeXt's font selection machinery
of typescripts and typefaces if not for his help and
patience. Attached in this mail is type-om.tex which is a set of
typescripts which loads omlgc and omarab fonts so they can be used
seamlessly with ConTeXt. This file provides a model for setting up
your own fonts in Gamma. But be sure to read mfonts.pdf from the
ConTeXt documentation.

IMPORTANT: you must change \texmf\omega\plain\base\grlccode.tex as follows:

\typeout{Greek lccodes...} ===> \message{Greek lccodes...}

You will notice that I have set the interlinespace for omarab as
3ex. Can Yannis or anyone else suggest a better value? (I don't use
omarab myself so I don't have a feel yet for what the best value would
be).

=========Language Environments: con-om.tex========

Also attached is con-om.tex which is a BETA port of omega.sty to
Gamma. While I have tested con-om.tex and it works fine so far, I am
sure I have done some things wrong here. For exampe, the environment
definitions use plain old \def whereas in ConTeXt there is a
\definestartstop mechanism which is really the right way to do this. I
also just replaced \DeclareRobustCommand with \def which may not be
the best thing to do (advice needed!).

=========Sample File: om-test7.tex==================

om-test7.tex is a test Gamma file that works for Latin and the Greek,
Arabic-Persian, and Urdu environments, and probably for the rest as
well.

=========Distribution==================

These three files are a gift to the Omega and ConTeXt communities. I
hope that eventually type-om.tex will be integrated into the ConTeXt
distribution and that con- om.tex will be integrated into the Omega
distribution to serve as the basis for a high-level interface to
ConTeXt. The first two, especially con-om, need improvement but I hope
that they make it easier for potential users of ConTeXt and Omega to
get off to a good start and not have to spend as much time as I did
getting things set up.

Jonas, please feel free to add this stuff to your omega site as well.

===========bugs======================

There are a few areas where ConTeXt and Omega don't interact well. I
sent a message to the ConTeXt list which I will forward to the Omega
list a little later.

=====================================

Thnx 2 Hans Hagen again for his patience and help. As modest as this
stuff is, I hope it helps to bring Omega and ConTeXt closer and as a
foundation for further improvements by real TeXnicians.

Best wishes
Idris

==========================
Dr. Idris Samawi Hamid
Depatment of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80526

