Re: Variables how-to needed

["Rogers, Michael K" <mroge02@emory.edu>]

On Jul 25, 2012, at 12:50 AM, Mari Voipio wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I'm looking for some "for dummies" information about using variables.
> I tried looking for it in the wiki, but only found this "Internals"
> page that's a bit too advantaged to me:
> http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Inside_ConTeXt#Using_variables
> I'm obviously missing something important, so I'd love to see a few
> more examples of variables and variable input files...
>
>
> What I want is price tags with the item name in Finnish and
> English/Swedish and then the price. These are placed on a small page
> and those small pages are then fit onto one A4 by imposition.
>
> Like this:
>
> Pieni nyörihaarukka, koivua   %variable 1,v-descr-fi
> {\em Small lucet, beech}   %variable 2, v-descr-en
>
> 6 eur  %variable 3, v-price1
>
> Made in xxx %variable 4, v-origin
>
>
> I can do the imposition, that is not a problem - and it works a lot
> better than a table, so no tables this way...
> .
> My data is in a list that can be converted to csv (although it'll then
> have a bunch of quotes to be removed), the list format is just like
> above:
> Item in Finnish, Item in English, price, country of origin.
>
> So the main problem is database/mailmerge/variablerelated: How do I
> (or should I) use variables to fetch this information from a separate
> spreadsheet type file, i.e. my price list?
>
> (IF this was MS Word or OpenOffice, it would be called Mail Merge, but
> in OO it sucks a bit; and I think the operation itself should be easy
> if  I just figure out how to do it...

Does this give you the sort of thing you want?  Sorry it's so kludgy (hey, \relax ;-).  There is an example of an address label in Mojca's http://dl.contextgarden.net/myway/csv.pdf but it threw an error in the current beta (I will write about that on a separate thread).  So I made the following (stupid) workaround:

\usemodule[database]
%\defineseparatedlist
%  [PriceTag]
%  [separator={:},command=\MyTag]
\defineseparatedlist
  [PriceTag]
  [separator={:},
   first=\MyTag,
   last=\blank,
   left=,
   right=\relax] % a hack, because command=\MyTag wasn't working in MKIV
\unexpanded\def\MyTag#1\relax#2\relax#3\relax#4\relax{ % ditto
  \framed
   [align={flushleft,lohi},
    width=6cm,
    height=3.2cm]{#1\crlf#2\crlf\crlf#3\crlf\crlf Made in #4}}
\starttext
\startPriceTag
Finnish thing:English name:2.15 eur:Finland
Pieni nyörihaarukka, koivua:Small lucet, beech:6 eur:xxx
\stopPriceTag

% or process the file
%\processdatabasefile[PriceTag][prices.txt]

\stoptext


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