Textmerg and Context

Textmerg and Context

[John Culleton]

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

Re: Textmerg and Context

[Hans Hagen]

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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