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


From: Dan H
Subject: Re: [Groff] How to switch off line filling?
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:03:56 +0100

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:45:15 +0000
Keith Marshall <address@hidden> wrote:

> ms *already* does italics and bold, and stuff!  Check out
> the .I, .B and .R macros, (and their hybrid .BR, .IR, .BI, etc.
> derivatives). And, you can also use the standard troff escapes.

Sorry, what I meant was a preprocessor that turns idioms like
/this/ and *this* into the appropriate inline codes. That's of course
no more than a bit of sed or some other regex match/replace thingy.

> Well, writing a fully featured macro package is far from a trivial
> task.

No, hell, I ain't touching any groff macro stuff. When I say
"preprocessor" I literally mean an external program whose stdout gets
piped into groff with whatever macro package.

My motivation is not to fine-hone groff documents, but to quickly
format quickly written messages (mostly emails). So any markup
charcter I've got to write is one too many, and to that end, with
respect to numbered nested lists, mm is a bit less verbose than ms.

> Don't let me discourage you, but be prepared for a lot of
> work ahead. Most of us, who use ms, treat it as a core resource,
> and augment it with our own additional macros -- an example might
> be wrapping .IP in a higher level macro, to automate the
> initialisation of number regisrers for nested numbered lists.

Sure. I've used TeX a lot, so I know that with such a "programmable
markup language" you've written your first macros before having
finished your first page of actual content.

For what I do I prefer groff over TeX because it can do text-type
(email compatible) as well as native PS output. Moreover, it is
faster and simpler and works as a UNIX pipe. Most importantly,
however, it is geeky, I've just discovered it, and it permits me to
waste my time doing stuff that will enable me to write my
reports 1% faster in the distant future, rather than just writing
them now in OpenOffice or whatever ;-)

--D.




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