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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Jonathan Fine wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">Philip wrote:</div>
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<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> I still do not understand why
anything more than "TeX out of the box" is required.</div>
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<div>This is a statement of fact, that I don't wish to
dispute. However, I think the question is being
discussed on the basis of good taste and being sensible.
And that much depends on the context, and the
preferences, skills and opinions of those who create and
support the production system. <br>
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OK, we can know nothing of the preferences and opinions of those
who create and support the production system, but we do know one
fact about their skills, or at least about the skills of the person
who asked the question in the first place. We know, because he sent
his message to the TeXhax list, that his skill-set includes TeX.
Given that, and no other information, why not a solution predicated
solely on the use of TeX, especially as the solution proposed makes
no use of any advanced TeX features whatsoever ?<br>
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<div>I fear that there are many problems in having TeX
increment a counter that has a significance across the
whole system. For example, what if producing the report
requires several typesetting runs.</div>
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A valid point, and not one that my proposed solution would directly
address.<br>
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<div>One could program TeX to maintain a database, much
like AWK can be so programmed. And what we have here is
a database of sorts. The 'requirement' to use something
other than TeX arises from things outside TeX, namely
the system that holds the data that is to be typeset.<br>
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Again, we know only two things about the system. It supports a file
system, and it supports TeX Therefore let us use the file system
and TeX rather than anything more complex.<br>
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Philip Taylor<br>
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