Re: [Groff] Groff editor.

[Ted Harding]

On 20-Aug-07 17:27:41, Clarke Echols wrote:
> Ouch!  That's painful! :-)

Perhaps it was only painful, Clarke, because I slung the whole
parcel at you, with long explanations, all at once!

Comparing with your procedure desribed below, what the user
does with my "ge" script is

1. ge filename
2. Edit the groff sile.
3. When you want to see what it looks like, ":w" in vim;
   then have a look at the 'gv' window.
4. Either finish off with ":q" in vim, or go back to 2.

Does that hurt a bit less? :)

There's a lot of wise comment in what you said about "engineering".
And I like you somments about Word.

Puzzle for Word fanatics: quickly convert all instances of
numbers (with decimal places and thousands separators) from
"Continental" format: 123.456,78 to "Anglo-Saxon": 123,456.78

Vim solution:

X
123.456,78
0,123
123.456.789

With the cursor at X:   :.,$s/\([0-9]\),\([0-9]\)/\1#\2/g
which gives

X
123.456#78      
0#123   
123.456.789

With the cursor again at X:   :.,$s/\([0-9]\)\.\([0-9]\)/\1,\2/g
which gives

X
123,456#78      
0#123   
123,456,789

With the cursor again at X:   :.,$s/\([0-9]\)#\([0-9]\)/\1.\2/g
which finally gives:

X
123,456.78      
0.123   
123,456,789     

The essence, of course, is that all, and only, "." and "," which
are between digits must be changed.

(I once did have to do this for whole chapters of a book in Word,
which had hundreds of such numbers; and the only way I found was
to do the same ","->"#", "."->",", "#"->"." strategy by a global
replace of every ocurrence of the character to be changed, but
with "confirm" switched on. That meant many thousands of on-the-fly
decisions, all of which had to be right!)

If it had been a plain-text, 'vim' would have done it in about
30 seconds.

Best wishes,
Ted.

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Date: 20-Aug-07                                       Time: 19:18:44
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