Re: [Groff] Does groff match my needs?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

<address@hidden> wrote:
 |Joh-Tob Schäg <address@hidden> wrote (Wed, 11 Nov 2015 17:32:47
 |+0100):
 |> i seached for an alternative to latex and found groff. Sadly i found
 |> no IRC or something where i could ask directly.
 |> But before i invest time in groff or some macro system, i wanted to
 |> know if it fits my needs.
 |> These are:
 |> -support for ä,ü,ö,Ä...
 |\[:a],\[:u],\[:o],\[:A],..
 |use preconv in order to translate from an encoding as utf8 to the groff
 |representation above; -D, -K, -k switches to groff are equivalent
 |Have a look at 'man groff' and 'man grof_char' for the chars.

I always use LATIN1 and use the umlauts etc. directly, as in

  ich m<F6>chte mich hiermit sehr herzlich f<FC>r die Wendung in
  unserem Rechtsstreit bedanken!

(This is via less(1) in an UTF-8 environment though.)

 |> -supporting word division for german (possible compound) words
 |watch out for hyphenation requests:
 |.hy, .hla and .hpf

E.g. this works pretty good for me, outsourced in its own file,

  .\"@ s-hw_german.tmac: hyphenation add-ons
  .hla de
  .hpf hyphen.de
  .hpfa hyphenex.de
  .
  .hw An-we-sen-heits-nach-weis
..list that increased over the years..
  .hw Ver-hand-lungs-ter-min
  .hw zu-min-dest

to be sourced into other documents via

  .mso s-hw_german.tmac

 |> -supports A4 paper format
 |Most tricky because you have to watch out at every transformation

Yeeees.

 |step: in groff, from groff to PS and from PS to pdf. For custom sizes,
 |this is a worst case, you might need to know ghostscript commandlines.

I have a shell alias for A4 (even with my own macros..)

  s-groff     'groff -dpaper=a4 -P-pa4'

 |  Be patiently in learning. Attempting to gain quick success in running

Ciao,

--steffen