[texhax] Heading question

[Donald Arseneau]

"D. R. Evans" <doc.evans at gmail.com> writes:

> Donald Arseneau said the following at 02/27/2008 04:21 AM :
> > "D. R. Evans" <doc.evans at gmail.com> writes:
> > 
> >> \headline={\ifnum\count0>1 {\ifodd\count0 \hss \it \ifx\topmark\botmark
> >> \else \topmark \fi \hss \else \hss \it <book name> \hss\fi}\fi}

> > Anyway, I don't think even the intent makes much sense.
> 
> I don't understand why you say that.
> 
> The intent is:
>   if the value of \topmark is the same as the value \botmark:
>      then this must be a new chapter, so don't print anything;

Why is the top mark equal to the bot mark only there?
They are equal on every page that contains no marks, as I recall.
In fact, I would expect the chapter-start page to contain a mark.

> > Rather, I'd suggest
> > 
> > \newif\ifspecialpage
> 
> OK; to me, when I first started trying to implement a solution to my
> problem, it seemed like an inelegant approach to tag just the pages where
> chapters began,

What?!?!  Even if comapring the top vs bottom marks works,
it is terribly obscure, and very fragile to any changes to
haow yu may decide to change the marks in the future.
A clearly named flag makes a lot more sense.

> I do wonder about how one is supposed to compare the values of \topmark,
> \firstmark and \botmark, though. There has to be an easy way to do it, but

\edef\topMacro{\topmark}%
\edef\botMacro{\botmark}%
\ifx\topMacro\botMacro



-- 
Donald Arseneau                          asnd at triumf.ca