Re: infinite page length?

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2020-04-29T17:04:27-0400, James K. Lowden wrote:
> I don't understand how man(1) suppresses pagination.  Is there any
> simple trick to viewing -ms documents in nroff without page
> boundaries?

Hi James!

I believe the answer is in an-old.tmac:

.\" We redefine .ne to avoid page breaks if cR is set; instead, the page
.\" length is increased to the necessary amount (this is needed for
.\" tables).
.\"
.\" Similarly, we redefine .bp if cR is set, adjusting the page length
.\" to the current position so that no empty lines are inserted.
.if \n[cR] \{\
.  de1 ne
.    ie \\n[.$] \
.      nr an-ne (v;\\$*)
.    el \
.      nr an-ne 1v
.    if (\\n[an-ne] >= \\n[.t]) \
.      pl +(\\n[an-ne]u - \\n[.t]u + 1v)
.  .
.
.  rn bp an-bp
.  de1 bp
.    br
.    pl \\n[nl]u
.    an-bp \\$*
.  .
.\}

> 
> I didn't find it in the papersize documentation.   Proof that I read
> it, I found a typo:
> 
>       The  value  of the papersize file can be overrideen
>       by looking in order

You appear to be referring to the papersize(5) man page.  On my
Debian-based system, this comes from a package called "libpaper1".

> I thought there might be a "fake" paper size, like length 0 or
> something, that indicates no pagination is needed.

That would be handy, but I have no idea if this could be added to the
core of the roff language without breaking things.

Individual macro packages can obviously hack round it.

The tbl preprocessor also needs a hack for tables of unbounded length;
see https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57665 .

> I guess it has something to do with the macro set and the target
> device, since mdoc is unpaginated in the terminal and paginated as
> PDF.  It would be nice to have the same available with ms.

Maybe someone else on the list has an idea how practical this might be;
I don't.

Regards,
Branden

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