As part of an attempt to debug another problem, I have a need for a TeX/LaTeX command that generates some dummy text in place. I know of lipsum and blindtext, but they are not what they want. What I have in mind is a command that takes the following arguments: a string (s) and integers (k and n), and produces k occurrences of s per line (no spaces) for n lines. I think this should be possible, even if one has to drop down to TeX to do it. After all, TeX is a text processing Turing complete programming language. Unfortunately, my knowledge of TeX could fit on a postage stamp with space left over, so I'm asking on this forum.
[Tex/LaTex] Generating dumthe text programatically using TeX/LaTeX
programmingstrings
Related Solutions
I'm not sure there is a good guide to refactoring TeX code, but a few things I note from the above you might want to think about:
Making global assignments should always make you think 'is this really needed?'. While making things global is quite often easy, other approaches are sometimes better, for example
\def\TempResult{Result}% \expandafter\endgroup \expandafter\def\expandafter\RealResult\expandafter{\TempResult}%Watch how you deal with
\fi. Remember that unless you expand the end of the conditional then they continue to stack up, and can lead to runaway conditions or exhaustion of the stack. This is why approaches such as\expandafter\NextFunction \fior
\if<something> \expandafter\@firstoftwo \else \expandafter\@secondoftwo \fi {True code} {False code}%are very common (often the second is pre-packed, for example in
etoolbox.Unless you want maximum performance, I'd favour using more, well-named macros over fewer longer ones, and favour macros over primitives (so
\@namedefrather than\expandafter\csname ...\endcsname, for example). (If you are really after maximum performance, then even additional\expandafters make a difference, but unless you are writing low-level kernel functions this should not be an issue!)
You can use a standard \renewcommand to modify the text:
\documentclass{article}
\newcommand{\someSpecialText}{A text that can be changed locally\ldots}
\newcommand{\testIt}{The value of \texttt{someSpecialText} is : ``\someSpecialText''.}
\begin{document}
% The default behavior.
\testIt
% Here I would like to change the definition of `\someSpecialText`
% or anywhere else in the document.
{% Start of group
\renewcommand{\someSpecialText}{A text that \textit{was} changed locally\ldots}
\testIt
}% End of group
% The default behavior.
\testIt
\end{document}
In the above example, the \renewcommand was placed inside a group, defined by the braces { and } to localize the redefinition. If this behaviour is not desired, simply remove the braces to make the redefinition global from that point forward.
Of course, one can also write this in a macro form, which could be considered "shorter", with some default value. Here is an example:
\documentclass{article}
\newcommand{\testIt}[1][A text that can be changed locally\ldots]{The value passed to \texttt{testIt} is : ``#1''.}
\begin{document}
% The default behavior.
\testIt
% Here I would like to change the definition of `\someSpecialText`
% or anywhere else in the document.
\testIt[A text that \textit{was} changed locally\ldots]
% The default behavior.
\testIt
\end{document}
\testIt is set up to output something with a default value. However, you can supply an optional argument that modifies the default behaviour.
Best Answer
The simplest way IMHO to do it is to use
\foreachprovided by thepgfforpackage. There is also the lower level\loop\ifnum\j<\k ... \repeatloop which could also be used. However, you need to wrap the inner loop in a group to mask the inner\repeat.As Andrey already stated there are the open question about how to handle line breaks exactly. I simply use a
\\here, but you might need something else instead, dependent on the exact application. However, the principle usage of the loops is the same.