Variables how-to needed

[Mari Voipio <mari.voipio@iki.fi>]

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...


Thank you,

Mari
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________