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Context mkiv has xml capabilities and it can now publish a xml database. The Speedata publisher is based on LuaTeX and is made to do database publishing.
How do these systems compare? Can ConTeXt do the dynamic pagelayout/virtual page of speedata? Also speedata have an example of putting a figure symmetrically in between two columns. Is that doable in context?
As mentioned: the answer I give is based on my limited view of ConTeXT's XML processing capabilities. So please edit the answer as I might be wrong.
Input: The input of ConTeXt is mixed TeX and XML. Data is XML, layout (style information) is TeX. The input of speedata is only XML, the layout language is written as XML.
Features: ConTeXt is much older than my software, so there are many more features in ConTeXt than there are in the speedata Publisher. That said: the publisher has enough features to do many typesetting tasks, especially in the direction of “product catalogs”
Virtual pages: ConTeXt can do the virtual boxes as well. This is a basic feature of TeX so there is not much difference here. My software is doing the calculation in grid cells and ConTeXt does the calculation in (scaled) points, but in practice this does not make a difference.
Image shape: I don't know if ConTeXt allows such a thing, I'd appreciate an answer.
My very personal conclusion is: ConTeXt (as LaTeX) is more focused towards text output with complex structures (footnotes, math, ...) and my tool is more focused on the layout aspect. ConTeXt very likely able to create the same layouts as the speedata Publisher.
(Community wiki, anybody please edit this answer and add things)
\parshape, or do you infer it directly from the image? If the latter, then how?
go run main.go. You might need to edit the file to change the filename.
Having built a database publishing system based on ConTeXt I can confirm it's very well suited for the task, however IT IS NOT a database publishing system which means you have to build such system yourself from data acquisition via data processing and transformation to typesetting, but neither seems to be the Speedata publisher. You certainly don't expect users to edit xml files, do you? So you still have to build the whole part of the transmission belt from a user interface (GUI or web interface) to an xml file. The question arises whether you need an xml file at all? E.g. one could think of a web API directly generating ContTeXt code. Coming back to your question. You certainly can set up ConTeXt to process any XML file, however I have always preferred to use XSLT to obtain a simpler XML file which could be processed by ConTeXT in document order.
