[Groff] Groff and paper size selection.

[Bernd Salbrechter]

I saw two mails about that subject in this list, I will later refer to.

First I want to say, that I use groff and pstools to produce booklets on
my A3 PostScript printer (A Dataproducts LZR2665).

The native use of that tools has the following problems:
  1. The page size is part of the text, to which it not belongs. It make
     it difficult to use one text for several formats.
  2. Each combination of paper and page size, requires that i calculate
     the page arrangement by hand.
  3. Because I use other tolls to to generate PostScript pages, all have
     different methods to setup the page size, where most only support
     some common sizes (and they think A7 is not common:-).

So I start to setup a paper capability database (like termcap), which hold
the paper size and margins. I try to get more in it; i.e. signatures for
pstools, to get several pages on the front and backside of a sheet of
paper for perfect binding and so on. That information, will be need by
other tools, which can produce PostScript output to.

I am not very far with that project, but will but something together and
put it on my webspace, if you are interest. I am not sure about the
unit to use for the sizes as a first choice I used millimeters, but that
will change to a finer value.

On Fri, 7 Jan 2000 20:38:09 +0200 Fabrizio Polacco <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> as I have two old requests to get groff recognize the "global" paper
> selection in Debian systems (/etc/papersize); I studied the matter and I
...
> This way, I can substitute the line 
> 
>       papersize a4
> 
> in the DESC of lj4 and ps font (which is actually added by the Makefile)
> with 
> 
>       paperfile /etc/papersize
> 
> to get it from the configuration file, without the need of setting the
> -p option (which is not so trivial when you, as example, issue command
> "man" :-)

Dose this not interfere with groffs correction of the origin, which is
hard encoded as "paperlength 792000" in my groffs DESC.

...
> A better approach would be to use Yves Arrouye's libpaper.

Is this library public available?

On Fri, 7 Jan 2000 11:58:03 -0600 (CST) "Dr. Robert Herrmann" <address@hidden> 
wrote:

> Subject: [Groff] suggestion for grops
> 
> Much effort has been directed toward creating html files.
> 
> -----
> 
> At scientific meetings, poster presentations are made using
> large format printers, e.g, in the US one has a presentation space
> of 4' x 8' ( roughly 1 meter x 2 meters ). Widebed plotters
> are available with a widht of 36" (0.91 meters).
...
> 
> I have just used the groff .PSPIC command to create a large
> format output from individual groff pages. To do this I mustnow
> manually create the %%BoundingBox xl yl xh yh  entry in the PostScript file.
> 
> Would it be possible to have a flag -EPS for grops 
> so that the bounding box is provided?  For my uses, this can 
> from the medium used, e.g., Letter or Letter with -L flag.
> At the troff end, I must define the proper  controls for groff page
> management: 
>       .ll 70.0i
>       .pl 40.0i

Wouldn't it better to get this from a database in a consistent way for
all instances of your tool chain?

How do you handle the origin correction done by groff?


Have a nice day
Bernd Salbrechter