[bug #55081] [me] multi-column mode does not work with very long page lengths

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #55081 (project groff):

                 Summary: [me] two-column output does not work with footnotes
or very long page lengths => [me] multi-column mode does not work with very
long page lengths

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Follow-up Comment #19:

There were multiple issues reported in the original submission and trying to
solve them both at once is looking like a tangle.

I propose that we restrict this ticket to the page length issue, and leave the
multi-column mode/footnote interaction issue for bug #58736.

There are, moreover, multiple problems with multi-column/footnote interaction,
including one not noted here.

Retitling.

Right now I'm thinking that the main barrier to solving this is the fact that
me(7) does its initialization _including_ things that depend on the page
length (like setting up the footer trap) before reading even a single line of
the input.  (It can't help it, that's what '-me' _means_.)  Other macro
packages handle this by exposing command-line-settable registers to configure
such things (like groff man(7)--while it doesn't expose a page length
register, I've added one to it experimentally in the past with some success)
or must be "initialized" with a macro call (like ms, which requires an early
`LP` or `SH` call or similar).

At present, I suspect the foregoing design point accounts for the weird
159-line threshold issue I noted in comment #1.

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