On Thu, 23 Jul 2009, Stephen Gadsby wrote:
Please pardon my newness to TeX, ConTeXt, and this list. If I violate list etiquette, I apologize and hope you will let me know. Thank you.
Don't worry. Newbie questions are welcome here.
I'm attempting to abandon the use of Word for a maintaining a growing set of 30 to 60 page documents that provide information on similar, but not identical, equipment at a range of locations. My idea was to create one ConTeXt project that, depending upon the definition of one string in the project file, appropriately adjusts the resulting document's title and pulls in component "foo" for location "A", "bar" for location "B", etc.
My problem is, after playing with if, ifx, and ifcase for some time and digging through all the ConTeXt and TeX documentation I can find, I'm still not understanding how to accomplish the TeX/ConTeXt equivalent of:
if <string in variable> equals <string> then do thing 1 ... do thing n else if...
ConTeXt has a mechanism called modes that does exactly this. The official documentation is a bit terse, but should give you enough hints to get started. http://pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/mmodes.pdf There are also some hints on the wiki page: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Modes
If someone would please point me to documentation or an example of how to accomplish string comparison based if-thens in ConTeXt, I'd greatly appreciate it.
For what you want, modes should be sufficient. If for something else you really want to do string comparisons, ConTeXt provides a bunch of \doifelse commands http://wiki.contextgarden.net/System_Macros/Branches_and_Decisions Aditya