[OS X TeX] help

[ludwik kowalski]

On Feb 28, 2008, at 9:56 PM, Ari Stern wrote:

>> 2) Using TexShop I am composing an input.tex file. The file is long
>> because I pasted a long text into it. Here what I would like to be
>> able to do (but do not know how). Suppose I select a large number of
>> lines. Is there a command for placing the % sign in front of each of
>> them at once? Then I would select a small set of commands and remove
>> the % from them before pressing the "typeset" button. That would be
>> useful in debugging.
>
> If you want TeX to ignore a whole block of text, there's an
> alternative to commenting the individual lines out:
>
> \iffalse
> [... block of text to ignore ...]
> \fi
>
> I find this useful for debugging, as well as when I want to rewrite a
> passage, but don't want to delete my original draft from the source.


1) I suppose that [ ...... ] stands for a sequence of lines to be  
commented and that square brackets are not needed.
2) But what has to be false ? In other words, under what conditions  
will the block of lines be ignored by the compiler?
3)  When I commented a block of lines they were ignored  
unconditionally. What Ari is proposing seems to be different in that  
respect. Right or wrong?


Ludwik Kowalski, a retired physicist
5 Horizon Road, apt.2702, Fort Lee, NJ, 07024, USA
Also an amateur journalist at http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/