Question

I have some standard-texts, but some portion of it is different. But of these different parts only a few exists.

For instance I want:

\mytext{...}{a}  \mytext{...}{b} 

That produces:

\section{Item: ...}\label{item...} This is a standard item. Items of type a are very precious.  \section{Item: ...}\label{item...} This is a standard item. Items of type b are cheap. 

A simple solution to this would be to define commands mytexta and mytextb, but as I have more options I want more something like an if or switch in programming languages. Has anyone a solution for this problem?

Answer 1

The ifthen package (which is included in a standard LaTeX installation) defines a command \ifthenelse, which is used like this:

\usepackage{ifthen} \ifthenelse{test}{then-code}{else-code} 

so you could do something similar to:

\newcommand\mytext[1]{%     \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{a}}{very precious}{%     \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{b}}{cheap}{unknown}}} 

For LaTeX programming, I’d recommend getting a copy of The LaTeX Companion. It’s a really good reference for this stuff.