Announcing the visualcounter module

It has been almost two years since I posted about the main idea of the visualcounter module. I am happy to announce the official release of the module. I have been using this module in my presentations for almost two years without any problems, so I believe that it is stable enough to be released.

At present, the module is available on github and it should be available through ConTeXt garden soon. Look at the documentation to see some of the features of the module (in particular, the "star rating" example based on Jim Hefferon’s article in the Practex Journal).

The module provides six counters. Two of these were created for proof of concept and are not well tested; the remaining four—scratchcounter, mayanumbers, markers, and countdown—are well tested and, hopefully, their interface will not change.

This was my first module that uses the ConTeXt namespace macros. If you peek into the module, you’ll notice that I only define one macro; everything else is handled by the ConTeXt namespace macro \definenamespace.

The other interesting feature of this module is that I use a separate metapost instance for displaying the counters. This avoids conflict with user definitions. For example, if a user decides to change the metapost definition of fill for whatever reason,

\startMPdefinitions
let fill = draw;
\stopMPdefnition

such a change will not affect the visual counter module!

Any feedback is appreciated.