Re: [AUCTeX-devel] ConTeXt mkiv tex.el

[Tassilo Horn]

Carlos <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Carlos,

> I am impressed by it. I may be biased, which is not a good thing. But
> in my emacs The loading, stats, memory usage, and the running times
> were considerably improved.

Ok, I've just browsed http://wiki.contextgarden.net a bit, and it seems
that you are right and they are favoring Mark IV nowadays, and that the
standard way to compile a ConTeXt document using Mark IV is to use the
context command rather than texexec.

However, I as one of the AUCTeX maintainers have to judge carefully what
changes to incorporate to give an overall satifying experience.  For
example, those questions aren't clear to me:

  a) You suggest to use the context command in the ConTeXt Full entry in
     `TeX-command-list' rather than texexec.  Why not also in the
     ConTeXt entry?

  b) Will calling the context command also work on older TeX
     distributions?  Is it available there?

  c) Can there be ConTeXt documents that can be compiled with texexec
     but not with context and vice versa?

  d) Does context have the same command line options as texexec?

FWIW, on my system with TeX Live 2013, context doesn't seem to work:

,----
| % context cnt.tex                    
| 
| mtxrun          | unknown script 'context.lua' or 'mtx-context.lua'
`----

But I can easily compile the document with texexec.

That might be due to some missing TeX Live package (as said, I don't use
ConTeXt), but at least it demonstrates that just changing texexec to
context is not enough.

So maybe we should somehow check for a working context command and use
that by default, else fall back to texexec, or maybe (mostly depending
on question c) we may not hard-code the command in `TeX-command-list'
but allow setting it via some defcustom (which can then be configured
also on a per-document basis).

Bye,
Tassilo