[bug #61453] [nroff] request native mechanism for continuous (non-paginated) rendering

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #61453 (project groff):

[comment #0 original submission:]
> groff could provide a new, dedicated tmac file for this task
> and properly document its inclusion and use.  The existing
> macros in an.tmac could be leveraged for this if they're
> suitable for general use.

My guess now is that they aren't.  As I understand it, in contrast to the
one-long-page system the Texinfo manual gives an example of, the -man macros
set top and bottom margins of internal pages to 0, so that, even though nroff
outputs multiple "pages," the breaks between them are invisible, effectively
_looking_ like one long page.

This is fine in the -man language, which doesn't support footnotes.  But it's
unclear how this could be generalized to work with the full-service macro
packages, most of which do include mechanisms to render footnotes at the
bottom of the page.  In the one-long-page case, this pushes footnotes to the
end of the output.  But for multiple pages with invisible page breaks, this
would effectively put footnotes at random-seeming places in the middle of the
text.

This isn't to say that the problem is insurmountable, only that a
straightforward adaptation of the -man system probably won't cover the
complexities of existing macro packages or unfettered roff.

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