From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.comp.tex.context/9119 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: John Culleton Newsgroups: gmane.comp.tex.context Subject: Textmerg and Context Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 18:22:32 -0400 Sender: owner-ntg-context@let.uu.nl Message-ID: <200208301822.32770.john@wexfordpress.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035399472 789 80.91.224.250 (23 Oct 2002 18:57:52 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 18:57:52 +0000 (UTC) Original-To: ntg-context@ntg.nl Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.comp.tex.context:9119 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.context:9119 I am working with the textmerg macro (in plain tex mode) which is used to send form letters to a mailing list. I added a letterhead routine pirated from the letterformat macro in the TeXBook. Just for fun I ran my plain tex source through texexec without change. The following interesting things occurred. 1. The bloody thing worked, without any Context specific code at all. 2. It didn't understand \nopagenumbers (and complained about it), hence a page number appears at the top of each page. 3. A horizontal line, part of the letterhead, wrapped around about 1/8 inch. 4. The date routine (taken from letterformat. tex) got the day and the year right but gave me January instead of August for the month. 5. \parskip=\baselineskip didn't work for some reason. (They are both TeX primitives so it should work :-| ) 6. The default typeface is a bit bigger. Obviously this is abuse, not use, of Context. but it demonstrated that functioning plain tex code will run through the system and produce output, however imperfect. Since a mail merge might be useful to the Context world as well I will debug this horror and make it function properly. John Culleton