In article <1992Sep2.154831.22839@athena.mit.edu>, lasmith@athena.mit.edu (Lones A Smith) writes:
> for editing purposes. Here's what I want: I want to prefix the additional
> comments for my expanded version of the notes by a symbol --- call it ** ---
> so that lines preceeded by ** are only printed out when a particular control sequence in the preamble is present. That is,
>
> privatenotes.tex
>
> Control sequence present
> ** personal extra remarks
> Class notes
>
> classhandout.tex
>
> Control sequence NOT present
> ** personal extra remarks
> Class notes
>
> Then when I LaTeX the first file, the ** should be ignored entirely, whereas when I LaTeX the second file ** should be read as %. Brute force methods
> have failed me. Any ideas, (La)TeXperts??????
It is a different solution, but you might get DM Jones' tex-index from
niord.shsu.edu and look up version.sty by Piet van Oostrum.
If you really want to use a beginning-of-every-line-flag, you might consider
something as simple as '%**' and use tr (a GNU utility) to translate, then
feed to TeX. tr for os/2 can be found on ftp-os2.nmsu.edu in pub/os2/all/gnu