> There were also some development effort to “easy” LaTeX typesettings (for instance ConTeXt) but they not became widespread as “WYSIWYM” editors such LyX or TeXMacs, IMVHO because they are in fact less flexible than plain LaTeX and plain LaTeX is easier enough, at least it’s give you a easy and simple “learning path”.
ConTeXt is a substantially different beast to LaTeX. It's not LaTeX, although there are some LaTeX-inspired packages and tools to help migrate. A lot of ConTeXt is now written in Lua, and the versions in TeXlive are now sufficiently up-to-date to work from the manuals.
ConTeXt takes the view that it will start with sensible defaults and allow nearly all to be customized. Modules tend to play nicely together in an orthogonal way, but a lot of documents can be written without importing any modules.
The one thing I wouldn't say about ConTeXt is it's easier – you probably won't find the answers on stackoverflow like for LaTeX. It's a much more complicated system and you need the reference manual. But if you know how you want the page laid out and don't want to have to hack away at a style file, then it's a very powerful tool for serious typesetting.
I have used ConTeXt a fair amount and I like it quite a bit. I would actually say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more discoverable. After you use it for a bit, you see that the macros are all built on each other in predictable ways, so they all tend to take the same options and achieve similar effects. In LaTeX, the answer to your questions is usually "there's a package for that," whereas in ConTeXt, the answer is often "this macro takes the same options as this other macro, so just pass them in."
What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using plain TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe. I suspect this is because it is hard to build a resilient declarative system on highly weird and procedural TeX. ConTeXt, on the other hand, kind of encourages you to use TeX directly. So that led me to learning more about plain TeX, which now seems much less scary to me than when I was using LaTeX.
> I would actually say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more discoverable.
Agreed. I think what I was trying to say is that LaTeX will have more answers on Stack Overflow. However, once you've found the command (and you can get an awful long way with the ten listed at the beginning of the reference manual) then the options are well documented.
> What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using plain TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe.
This is very interesting. I've found the same difference but in the opposite way. I've had to resort to using plain TeX in LaTeX quite a bit, usually buried in an environment or a command, to achieve what I want. And yes, it can be fragile, but sometimes it is the only way without using KOMA-Script.
I've found that ConTeXt has usually already considered what I want to do as a use case, because its scope is quite a bit more broad than LaTeX.
Most of my questions on tex.SE are about ConTeXt, simply because all paths in ConTeXt are less explored than LaTeX. The frontier is nearer. But I have never failed to get a useful and informative solution from one of the handful of experts.
I wish I had sources for my other comments handy. If I have time I will try to dig some up.
Context seems to risky to use, its being maintained by a tiny number of maintainers, as of sometime I go, (I think) the source repos were not available publicly. Also it is difficult to install, and hard to find documentation for.
> its being maintained by a tiny number of maintainers
That is true, but it is quite stable and it works well. The last released version is from 2015. The last LaTeX release was 2e in 1994. LaTeX 3 is apparently still being developed by a small number of maintainers. [0]
> (I think) the source repos were not available publicly
From the homepage: "There is no offical repository there the development is going. The source code is released irregularly and placed at the http://www.pragma-ade.com website."
There's a git mirror of the releases.[1]
> Also it is difficult to install
It's in TeXLive and works fine. There was a time of intensive development a few years ago, and TeXLive decided to include older, more stable versions.
> and hard to find documentation for.
The main documentation is the reference manual, linked to from the home page [2]. That said, it's a real shame there isn't more web-friendly documentation. The Wiki has some commands documented, but others are either missing or out of date.
ConTeXt is a substantially different beast to LaTeX. It's not LaTeX, although there are some LaTeX-inspired packages and tools to help migrate. A lot of ConTeXt is now written in Lua, and the versions in TeXlive are now sufficiently up-to-date to work from the manuals.
ConTeXt takes the view that it will start with sensible defaults and allow nearly all to be customized. Modules tend to play nicely together in an orthogonal way, but a lot of documents can be written without importing any modules.
The one thing I wouldn't say about ConTeXt is it's easier – you probably won't find the answers on stackoverflow like for LaTeX. It's a much more complicated system and you need the reference manual. But if you know how you want the page laid out and don't want to have to hack away at a style file, then it's a very powerful tool for serious typesetting.