Re: [Groff] Re: begin page blues

[Miklos Somogyi]

On 22/02/2006, at 6:28 PM, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > > What about "ps-mac" for PostScript Macro? If you don't like it,
> > > you can always say that you got it for free :-[[
> >
> > Well, it isn't for PS only...  I suggest `.post'.
>
> I found an even better one: `.device'.  For orthogonality, I'll
> probably provide `.device' for \X and `.devicem' for \Y.  The latter
> is less than trivial 10 code lines, while the former will take some
> time to get it right since I plan to make get really the same
> behaviour as with \X.  Following the patterns of other requests,
> `.device' will behave identically to `.write' and `.ds'.

Regarding the implementation of the \Y equivalent perhaps it is useful 
to have a look at
how SGI-troff-Adobe-ps handled the situation.

Here I include an old macro of mine that painted a "textport" and 
read-in a ps file to draw something.
Please note that in the .iP macro you can freely mix troff and ps 
instructions and parameters
can be passed to both the \\$1 etc way.
The price to pay for free mixing: all ps line need to be prepended with 
"\!".
Very much worth to pay.

macro.txt
Description: Text document

The routine was called as

        .iP 7.50 "Example of ''scattered operands''" -1 inc-mem-cfd

to produce this picture:

Picture 2.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

Things you don't recognize as std ps in the macro: they are routines I 
prepended
to the troff prologue.

Miklos