{plain-tex} commands used for macro {programming}.
Questions tagged [primitives]
89 questions
24
votes
1 answer
What does \/ do?
I've seen this in some tex file where a word is set in italics, but its ending is in regular font. Trying it out I don't see it making any difference, so I must be missing something. What does the \/ do?
a…
muk.li
- 3,620
12
votes
2 answers
Which TeX primitives can be recovered after their initial definitions are overwritten?
This is mostly an academic question out of curiosity, but I think it may give some interesting answers. The question is, given a TeX file beginning with \def\someprimitive{}, for which values of \someprimitive is it possible to recover its primitive…
Villemoes
- 4,131
9
votes
3 answers
\ignorespaces vs \relax
In the TeXbook, there is a macro called \ignorespaces:
\ignorespaces ⟨optional spaces⟩. TeX reads (and expands) tokens, doing nothing until reaching one that is not a ⟨space token⟩.
And there is another macro called \relax for which TeX does…
Stephen
- 3,826
9
votes
3 answers
How to use @ifstar with arguments
I want to use @ifstar to define a command, whose non-star version stores a value in a variable and whose star version reads the value from the variable. I tried the following. It doesn't produce an error, but doesn't print the value…
cocomore
- 91
5
votes
2 answers
Trying to understand \def\def@ sintax primitives
I am trying to understand this syntax of primitive \def
\DeclareOption{man}{%
\def\def@man{\@manmode}
}
Why this primitive nesting? And I do not get to understand why there is two \def sentences concatenated.
Ajedrez Ivan
- 53
2
votes
1 answer
"\show\ " outputs the "^^M" in TeX?
On page 10 of the book The TeXbook, it says that \show\cs, where \cs is any control sequence, can output its meaning. For example, \show\thinspace outputs
> \thinspace=macro:
->\kern .16667em .
Why does \show\ output:
> \^^M=macro:
->\ .
Why is…
Y. zeng
- 1,885