Re: [Groff] newbie question: .TL in mm

[Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 10:23 a.m. 07/02/2003 +0100, Bob Diertens wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 08:50:12PM -0800, Juan Zuluaga wrote:
> > I want to put a title in my little paper,
> > but if I compose
> > [ ... examples deleted ... ]
> > I am processing the files by groff -mm
> >
> > What am I missing? How should I compose title and
> > author lines in the
> > mm format? How to place a .TL line in a groff -mm
> > document ?
>
> I have composed an example for you.
>
> ---8<---
> .COVER
> .TL abc def
> Explanation of 'beginning' macros
> .AF "The Obscure Company"
> .AU "B. Diertens" BD "University of Amsterdam" "Computer Science"
> .TM 5
> .AS 2 0.5i
> This is nothing more than an example of the 'beginning' macros.
> For more information, one has to check the manual of the mm macros.
> .AE
> .COVEND

Notice that this works if and only if you want to have a cover page. In the 
more common case, that is composing a "paper style" report, be it for a 
class or as a pre-publication draft, you will use the macro .MT with a 
value of 4 to create a "released paper style" memorandum.

That is (order is critical):

.TL [optional budget charging code] [optional archive filing code]
"The title"
.AF "Institutional affiliation"
.AU "AuthorName" [optional initials] [optional location] [optional blah ...]
.AS [optional placement] [optional indention]
[optional abstract]
.AE
.MT 4
.\" start text...
.P
text, text \"This line may come out centered as explained
            \" below.
.P
text,text

There is a *bug* in the mgm macros such that if you select the released 
paper style and you use an empty string as argument to the .AF macro or no 
argument at all, the output routines mess up and the first line of test is 
output centered. The workaround to this problem is to always give .AF an 
string even if invisible (empty will not work).

That is:

.AF             \" doesn't work though it should use the default!!!
.AF ""          \" doesn't work though it should use the default!!!
.AF " "         \"doesn't work because argument is empty
.AF "\ "        \" works, because the argument is not empty, just invisible.

This behavior is totally unexpected if you are used to use the original ATT 
DWB mm macros. I wonder if the problem is that the string that contains the 
default institution name, }2, is undefined in mgm as far as I can see (I 
mean, it calls hd*suf-space that calculates header spacing, and has nothing 
to do with .AF)?

As well, viz. the DWB mm macros, the spacing between the title block and 
the beginning of text in the mgm macros is more than 2 times as much (which 
to me is visually perturbing, I feel it disrupts text flow, but then that's 
merely an opinion on typographical design).

Cheers