Re: [Groff] mom: Some follow-up questions

[Peter Schaffter]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2005, Mats Broberg wrote:
> > Indeed.  AFAIK, groff can't measure the width of serifs.  
> > Besides, IMO, adjusting a dropcap for protruding serifs isn't 
> > a science; it's a complex judgment call.
>
> I agree. What I meant was that if protruding of drop caps was possible,
> one could use the function manually, and protrude the drop cap by trial
> & error until it appeared optically aligned in the output.

Yes, this is quite do-able.  Say you wanted a 3-line dropcap A
pulled into the left margin by three points.  In mom, you'd do:

    .DROPCAP "\*[BCK 3p]A" 3

Normally, one doesn't require double-quotes around the first
argument to .DROPCAP, since it's usually just a single letter.
However, if you want to use the escape \*[BCK <n><unit>], which
contains a space, you must doublequote the arg.

> > One of the overriding concerns in the mom macros is ensuring 
> > that no pages hang, hence the penalty is to move the footnote 
> > of a footnote reference that occurs too close to the bottom 
> > of the page over to the next page.
>
> Personally, I think a foonote ref on one page and a footnote on the next
> is more obtrusive to the reader than a page that is hung, but other
> people may have other opinions.

Footnotes are always a problem, since people always have differing
opinions.  But you have got me thinking.  If users do, in fact,
want what you describe, it's part of mom's mandate to offer them the
choice.

> I found this in the archives, written by you last year (I think):
> 
> "However, no cross-reference facilities.  I've given the matter some
> thought, but have yet to come up with a way of implementing them in
> mom [...}"
> 
> Still true? 

Still true, I'm afraid.  Setting up cross-referencing in mom will
be a complex task (for me, at any rate).

The mom macros came into being primarily to serve the needs of
typesetters and non-technical writers.  I realized that would be
annoying to technical writers who liked mom but needed greater
functionality (floats and keeps, cross-referencing, nested
footnotes, etc.), but no more annoying than, say, learning ms/mm/me
only to discover that they don't natively--or easily--provide the
design flexbility of mom.  Macro sets, it seems, are like any other
app: the one you like inevitably doesn't have the thing you want. :)

I intend to start addressing myself to the concerns of technical
writing; however, time has become limited since the publication of
my novel.  I have to set priorities.  Cross-referencing is presently
low on the list.

Which brings me to a question: is anyone on the list interested
in working with me on expanding mom?  So far, it's been a
one-man-band project, but I don't have the luxury of developing
that way any more.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
  Author of _The Schumann Proof_ (RendezVous Press, Canada)
  http://www.golden.net/~ptpi/theschumannproof.html