Re: Textmerg and Context

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 06:22 PM 8/30/2002 -0400, John Culleton wrote:
>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.

\ifx\nopagenumbers\undefined

   \def\nopagenumbers{\setuppagenumbering[state=stop]}

\fi

>3.  A horizontal line, part of the letterhead, wrapped around about
>1/8 inch.

\setuplayout ...

>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.

then just hook it into \currentdate

(nb: \normalday \normalyear \normalmonth are also aviable)

>5. \parskip=\baselineskip didn't work for some reason. (They are
>both TeX primitives so it should work :-| )

well, not if they are redefined, like \def\parskip{\toks0=}

just say:

\setupwhitespace[line]

>6. The default typeface is a bit bigger.

\setupbodyfont[10pt] == plain tex

>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.

Hans
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