I'm using Plain TeX and want to be able to abstract away the preamble of an \halign
so that I can just call it with a number of columns in a macro like \customalign
, and I want to use a macro to make it more legible. However, this minimal example of using a macro to define the structure of the \halign
\edef\preamb{## & ## \cr}
\halign{ \preamb
first line & second column \cr
}
results in these errors:
! Missing # inserted in alignment preamble.
<to be read again>
&
l.3 first line &
second column \cr
?
! Missing # inserted in alignment preamble.
<to be read again>
\cr
l.3 first line & second column \cr
?
)
Am I doing something incorrectly, or is this just not possible?