7

I found several entries about the fact that the ifthen package is obsolete. So my question is: how to define a condition check then? I have searched and I find several example for ifthenelse (contained in the ifthen) package OR the statement "ifthen package is obsolete".

Community
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strauberry
  • 3,255
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    it is not obsolete –  May 06 '13 at 12:32
  • @Herbert I agree; maybe it's not the first choice any more, but it's easy and in some cases it's sufficient. Probably using xifthen in place of it is better anyway. – egreg May 06 '13 at 13:01

2 Answers2

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I prefer

\def\something{} %% set to true
%% or:
\let\something\undefined %% set to false

\ifdefined\something
  True
\else
  False
\fi

to avoid the ifthen package.

The advantage of not using a package is that this approach can be used in files that are just \input by large document (for example TikZ images), when it cannot be guaranteed that a certain package is loaded.

Scz
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  • Your code only shows how to check whether a macro is defined; I believe the OP's question is more general than that. – jub0bs Aug 09 '14 at 14:38
  • If you can influence setting the variable to true or false, you can also instead define or undefine it (\let\something\undefined) – Scz Aug 11 '14 at 16:30
7

It may be considered obsolete because there exist more modern variants and the package was not updated for a long time.

See for example http://www.ctan.org/pkg/etoolbox which uses e-TeX features.

Apart from the macros in ifthenelse being fragile, if you can handle that, you can just use them, no problem.

Frank
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