Re: Auto-resize paper size during document run?

[James K. Lowden]

On Wed, 26 May 2021 21:01:33 +0200
Oliver Corff <oliver.corff@email.de> wrote:

> Of course, I can typeset the table separately and assemble the pdf
> pages by hand, but a solution totally controlled from within the
> groff file would be great.

Not an answer, but in ancient times, your output would have gone a
printer, which might have had different paper in different trays.  It
woudn't be unusual to use legal-size paper in landscape mode for tables
with 30 or more columns, with no opportunity to use pstricks.  

I've often wished for a groff cookbook of odd tricks, such as how to
print envelopes. A quick glance at Adobe's Postcript reference manual
turns up "setpagedevice", which looks to be its ioctl: it seems to be a
set of device-specific name-value pairs for doing things like selecting
paper trays and telling the printer to stop while the envelope is
inserted.  

No problem for groff; that's what  \X'ps: exec code' is for. Sadly, in
2021, I have no idea where to obtain the Postscript device-specific
features for any printer, or whether such information is even published
anymore.