Re: [Groff] How to switch off line filling?

[Dan H]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:23:51 +0000
Keith Marshall <address@hidden> wrote:

> With respect, I beg to differ; ms has very capable support for
> lists, (bulleted, numbered or glossary), nested to *any* arbitrary
> level.

Hello Keith,
yeah, I've found out how ms does the list thing. I agree that it is
capable of creating good-looking lists but I like auto-numbering and
such. But since I'm beginning to like groff good enough to write some
simple preprocessor for my own needs (something that
creates /italics/ and *bold* and stuff) I might as well add some
list support code, and then it doesn't matter which tmac package I
use.

Thanks for the detailed list info!

> man invokes troff using a traditional pipeline, with the source for
> the manpage being inserted into the input stream using cat.
> Immediately before the `cat manpage.n' command, it inserts an `echo
> ".pl 1100i"', so setting an arbitrarily long page of 1,100 inches,
> (closer to 28 metres than the five Joerg suggested).  Thus, man
> pages *are* actually paginated, but the effective page length is so
> long that the first page is unlikely to be filled.

That's pretty crazy or, as long as we're talking among friends here,
pretty braindead (compared to the obvious solution of adding a
no-pagination option to groff). I need to look at the mplayer
manpage, it's likely to be longer than 28 meters.

Regards,
--D.