modification to comment environment

Question

I'm using the comment package, in my preamble I have

\specialcomment{notes}{\begingroup \color{Blue}}{\endgroup}

so that when I want to comment my text I write

\begin{notes}...\end{notes}

to get a blue output. Because I need to print in black and white, it would be useful for the comments to be clearer in text. So I would like to get this to produce a line break, bold text saying "Notes:" and another line break at the end of my comment. I would also like to still be able to type

\excludecomment{notes}

to get rid of all my comments, without affecting the spacing of the text (as it would be without any notes).

Since I don't know anything about latex programming, I was hoping someone could help me, as experts on this site have been of great help to me in the past. Solutions that don't use the package I have at the moment would be fine as well. Thank you very much :)

Answer 1

Just define the notes environment to do what you want:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xcolor,comment}

\newenvironment{notes}
 {\par\textcolor{blue}{\bfseries Note:} \color{blue}\ignorespaces}
 {\par}

%\excludecomment{notes}

\begin{document}

Some text for saying some nonsense.
\begin{notes}
Here we want to add a note.
\end{notes}
Start again with nonsense.

\bigskip

\excludecomment{notes}

Some text for saying some nonsense.
\begin{notes}
Here we want to add a note.
\end{notes}
Start again with nonsense.

\end{document}

Uncommenting the \excludecomment line will hide the notes environment, like in the emulation in the second part of the example.

The flow is interrupted, but this is a limitation of the comment package. When you are finished and remove the notes environments, you can reestablish the correct flow.

Note: I issued twice the color instruction, because it's better not to have \color after \par if it's possible to avoid it. However,

\newenvironment{notes}
 {\par\leavevmode\color{blue}{\bfseries Note:} \ignorespaces}
 {\par}

would be the same.