Re: [Groff] Playing with the postscript output

[Larry Kollar]

Thomas Baruchel wrote:

> drawing the announcement card for my baby with groff ;-)
>
> I want to put two of them on one page. Of course, I could
> write the groff code twice, or make an EPS file and include
> twice the EPS code in my document, but I would like to know
> if I can play with the postscript like that:

I have done similar documents (two copies on one page)
and what I did was to create a macro and call it twice:

.de ANNOUNCEMENT
.\" text of the announcement or flyer
..
.2C
.ANNOUNCEMENT
.sp 47\"   some large number to move to the next column
.ANNOUNCEMENT

> Why do I want to do that ? Because "the whole stuff" has is a pretty big
> stuff with pictures in it, and I want to make a smaller postscript file
> by playing with macros.

I presume that you are trying to minimize the time needed
to print by only downloading the file once. The easy way is
to use the -c option to grops -- for example, to print 50
copies, you could use:

        groff -P-c50 announcement.t | lpr

I just tried this with a document of mine and it effectively
does what you want: sends one copy and tells the printer
to make as many copies as desired.

Hope that helps!
--
Larry Kollar      k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: the Revival
http://www.alltel.net/~kollar/utp