PS TEXT FORMAT Reference Manual

Overview of TFORM Capabilities
11387 Tandem Computers Incorporated 2–31
The FILE command contains a FILE OPEN command, for which you must
specify READ or WRITE; a FILE READ command; a FILE WRITE
command; and a FILE CLOSE command. When TFORM is finished with
your file, it closes all files you opened.
Conditional Processing The IF construct is a series of related commands in a given sequence
bounding other commands or text that allows you to carry out the
commands (or not), format the text (or not), or allows you to do nothing.
One or more expressions that you include in the IF construct determine
how TFORM uses the commands within the construct.
Repetitive Processing If you want to perform the same formatting operations repeatedly on a
given document (or part of a document) a controlled number of times, you
can do it with the LOOP construct.
Generating Form Letters You can create customized form letters with the LETTER macro package,
which consists of two macros: the LETTER macro, which processes the
body of the letter you wish to send, and the ADDRESS macro, which
handles the dating and addressing of each letter.
You follow these basic steps to use the LETTER command:
Create a letter (your body file), in which you place indirect variable
names ( \(var\) ) at the points where you want TFORM to insert
particular items to customize it.
Create a second file of names and addresses to which you want the
letters sent (your list file).
At the beginning of the second file, put a template that associates the
variable names in the body of the letter with the entries in the list file.
TFORM handles the rest of the functions. The LETTER macro package,
including an example of the body file and the list file, is described in
Section 3.