In the past I've done macros that behave differently depending if their argument is document (block) or not.

You probably need to do that

Sam

On 22 Sep 2016 5:26 p.m., "Karl Hegbloom" <address@hidden> wrote:

I was goofing around trying to create a \redact{} macro, and having trouble getting it to work right because the \phantom {} macro is inline and so when I try to wrap a block of text (where the text has a line break inside a paragraph) it gets turned into one long line. I want the \redact macro so that I can wrap things like people's names, social security numbers, telephone numbers, and home addresses with it in a legal filing, and then produce a redacted copy for more-public consumption.

The \redact macro has a \with inside wrapping an \if so that a global setting can control whether \redact renders as text or as redacted text. 

I'm finding the source editor to be confusing because sometimes I think the macro needs to be line broken and indented,  but other times it belongs all written in one line... Q: does writing the macro with a line break and indenting cause it to be block context? How can I control that? How can I, for example, cause the text inside the branches of an \if or \case to appear as block context content, fully line-broken?... or as inline content, if that's what I want? I could not get an \if to split like that.

I found \repeat-through {}{} which uses \datoms {}{} to write / characters through each character of the tract inside of it, and it works for both inline and block text. It's great, but I can still read the text. I had been using a composition of \gnawed and \degraded font effects to achieve redaction. I want it to be unreadable but not solid black, since that wastes ink when printing. I also want the PDF produced when redaction is enabled to not carry the actual text (as internal strings that can be found with, e.g., grep or a text editor. When I tried to use those font effects within the \datoms, it slowed down TeXmacs to the point that it was unusable.

So then I started experimenting with the items under the Insert  -> Fold menu. I'm finding that those are not very well documented yet and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to use them. I think that the "it turns into one long line" problem happens no matter what I tried anyway.

Also, I think there might be documentation files in the source repository that are not becoming part of the documentation available from the help menu. Are they out of date? Or forgotten due to other projects' higher precedence?