[texhax] Am I on the lastpage?

[Schwartz, Steven J]

Reinhard,

Thanks for the reply. I think it's a very good reply, but perhaps not to the question I posed. See below:

Reinhard Kotucha wrote on 2013-05-19:
----------------
> On 2013-05-19 at 16:39:26 +0000, Schwartz, Steven J wrote:
> 
>> (I tried to send this a week ago but haven't seen it, so perhaps it got
>> lost)  > Dear All,  >  > I have a class file that uses fancyhdr and
>> latex's leftmarks to
> set  > footers depending on the context. It's for exams, so it sets  >
> footers to "Turn to next page" or "This question continues ..." or  >
> whatever, and on the last page it's supposed to write "End of  >
> Examination". To accomplish this last task, I borrowed the logic  >
> from the lastpage package. That is, AtEndDocument I write out a  >
> label called lastpage, and in my header- building code I use an  >
> ifthenelse construction to compare \thepage with  > \pageref{lastpage}.
>> 
>> This works most of the time, but fails when there is only a small
>> paragraph on the last page. This is due to the well-known TeX  >
> behaviour which results (see the TeX FAQ) in \thepage being "almost  >
> always wrong in the first paragraph of a page".
> 
>> 
>> I have looked briefly at the most recent lastpage package and also
>> the documentation for pageslts, but I think both are more concerned
>> with accessing information via labels.
>> 
>> There is a manual workaround by inserting a \pagebreak should this
>> happen, but since I distribute this .cls to colleagues who are not
>> all TeXies, I'm looking for an automated self-contained  > approach.
> And one which doesn't rely on too many external packages  > and such
> (which is why my .cls borrowed ideas from lastpage, with  > proper
> credit, rather then used the ctan package).
>> 
>> Anyone have any suggestions?
> 
> texdoc atveryend

I spent some time getting my code to talk to this package, only to realise (I think) that it doesn't solve my problem. It DOES provide a robust way to find out what the number of the last page of the document is, by writing it, e.g., as a \newlabel, to the aux file. But what I need to be able to do somehow is to compare that last page number with the number of the page on which the currently-being-processed text will appear. As \thepage is unreliable, I'm stuck, or perhaps missing something obvious.

In short, the title of this thread expresses my problem. I don't want to know what the number of the lastpage is (although I appreciate that atveryend does a better job than lastpage); I want to know if I'm on it.

Thanks
Steve 


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Professor Steven J Schwartz        Phone:  +44 (0)207 594 7660
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