Hello All,

I was trying to read the value of '\totalnumberofpages' into lua to do something with it. As an example, see below.

Now, as I understand it, my example would not work as TeX gets the first go at this and therefore the variable 'pages' is the string '\totalnumberofpages' and not the actual value itself. And Lua cannot process this "calculation".

I tried to go thru the manual -  cld-mkiv.pdf  - in the distro but could not catch on how to read a metadata value (not print). I am sure that I am missing a small trick somewhere (or is it something more involved?).

\startluacode

function myFancyCalculations(pages)

  -- some fancy stuff but as an example

local myCal = tonumber(pages) + 1

return myCal

\stopluacode

\starttext

\blah

\ctxlua{context(myFancyCalculations("\\totalnumberofpages"))}

\stoptext