[texhax] Superstitions

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 02:21:24PM -0600, Gordon Haverland wrote:

> On April 23, 2011, Uwe Ziegenhagen wrote:
> > 2011/4/23 Gordon Haverland <ghaverla at materialisations.com>
> > 
> > > I don't suppose there is some easy way to deal with
> > > superstitions in LaTeX?  I looked around CTAN a bit, and
> > > nothing jumped out at me.
> > > 
> > > I suspect the company I am doing work for is superstitious,
> > > or customers are.  But I ran across an enumerated list where
> > > there is
> > > 
> > > no 13'th element.  What I've done is:
> > >    13) Purposely blank.
> > > 
> > > But is there something else that is more universal?
> > 
> > You're kidding, aren't you?
> > 
> > If you are *really not* kidding I suppose the way to go would
> > be to check in an enumerate list if you are at the thirteenth
> > element and insert the "13) Purposely blank" item.
> 
> It has to be more involved than that.  If the 12/13 interface 
> breaks a page, and hence the first item on the next page is 14 
> (because 13 is supposed to be missing), do people wonder what 
> happened to 13?  In the middle of the page to go 11, 12, 14, 15
> is probably okay.

\makeatletter
\renewcommand*{\@arabic}[1]{%
  \ifnum#1=13 %
    12a%
  \else
    \ifnum#1=-13 %
      -12a%
    \else
      \expandafter\@firstofone\expandafter{\number#1}%
    \fi
  \fi
}
\makeatother

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek