Re: [Groff] header and footer in a cv with -mom

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> Wow!
> That has apparently solved my problem! Thank you!!
> I am really amazed how one can find that in such a big and
> cryptic file.

Funny, because it took me probably only 10 minutes to find the
bug, even though I'm not familiar with mom at all.  In this
case of course I was lucky because the bug was rather simple.

I guess there's two parts to solving problems like this:
experience in working with groff, and a strategy for finding
bugs.  However, I'm afraid can't really offer much more than
"insert suitable print statements at strategic positions in the
code to figure out where certain variables get their values",
the crucial point being, of course, figuring out "where" and
"what".  Lastly, it comes down to what we call "intuition",
which is probably just a fancy name for "this looks similar
to something I've seen before elsewhere, so why don't we try
something which helped in that other situation".


> Will i be able to read macrodefinitions like that by digging
> into "info groff"? Or is there another groff howto that i
> should start with?

My suggestion is to read the Troff User's Manual
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr/54.ps.gz (which, by the
way, is a most amazing piece of documentation: it's terse and
extremely dense in information, yet still perfectly readable),
play around a bit formatting a simple document using bare groff
without any macro package, and then actually working through the
tutorial at the end of the Troff User's Manual to create your
own rudimentary macro package.  This is fun and it illustrates
techniques for dealing with the most common issues encountered
in document formatting and layout.