Branden,
Excellent fixes. Thank you!
Doug
> Why would you want a table *inside* a paragraph rather than
> starting a new paragraph after a table?
The table may be in a floating keep (e.g. .KF in -ms mmacros).
Then it's quite likely to pop up in the middle of a paragraph.
The suggestion to cause .TE to insert space would pose minimal
th
> often Tex just failed and overset lines.
Yes, TeX's curious policy of doing something terribly if
it can't be done well has led me to turn on \sloppy mode
by default, because "sloppy" is better than wrong.
Which brings me to another probable quibble with Knuth-
Plass. The "simple optimal text f
Under groff 1.18.1.1 on Cygwin or Linux Fedora, pspic causes groff
to hang unless I take unusual measures. A simple demo:
groff -pspic /dev/null
Looking deeper, I am surprised to find pic running--I can't
imagine why. Apparently some process is trying to read
standard input. It can be s
roken down into right triangles ... but this is madness.
It it seems like a good idea, I might volunteer to try to
do it right.
Doug McIlroy
> troff pre-dates C by quite a while
Actually not. C and nroff were contemporary--both debuted in 2nd edition Unix.
troff came in the 3rd edition. Of course nroff was preceded by roff, and
that by runoff; but neither of those had a | operator, which was the
triggering question. Certainly by the
sk her.
She has a profile on LinkedIn
Doug McIlroy
> I have been contemplating for a long time putting together
> a connected account
Cheers! I really miss having concise yet complete online
documentation for much Gnu software (pace Texinfo). One shouldn't
have to scrounge around obscure history websites to find out
how to use it. (I flip back
This sequence produces a mystery diagnostic that
apparently refers to the name of a nonterminal
symbol in some unpublish BNF:
___
bug-groff mailing list
bug-gr...@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-groff
This sequence produces a mystery diagnostic that
I suppose refers to the name of a nonterminal
symbol in some unpublish BNF:
\s\d
The diagnostic is "cannot use a node as a starting delimiter"
___
bug-groff mailing list
bug-gr...@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu
refer-1.20.1 running under cygwin accepts CRLF line terminations
without complaint, as do other groff programs. But one feature
suffers: a citation with two authors prints thus:
Author1, Author2, and Author2
With carriage returns eliminated from the database file, the
same citation reads:
This thread has mentioned Kernighan's troff tutorial
Here's where to get it:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/index.html
Of course it lacks the modest, but very helpful,
groff extensions, but it'sa great base document.
I would think Brian would welcome an upgrade.
He's b...@
27;d be delighted if somebody could tell me I
missed something capable.
Doug McIlroy
> if only there were a viewer designed for dealing with, oh, dvi or ps.
Unless I've missed the point entirely, why not a trivial
shell script using, say, gv? Admittedly it falls short on
the extra-credit challenge:
> the "SEE ALSO" references could be "hyperlinks"
Doug McIlroy
the
details if you're interested.
Doug McIlroy
In my opinion, it would be sad to see discussions about
groff pulled inside the gates of a social network. I would
hope that little of general interest has migrated there.
Doug
The "crude hack" cited below effectively turns apostrophe into prime,
known in groff as foot mark, \[fm], which may be what you were hoping for.
> Could you please tell me the purpose of this mapping
> in unicode.tmac:
>
>.char ' \[cq]
>
> This causes all apostrophes to be typeset as closing
>
obsolete.
You can find it in http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/msmacros.bun.
Doug McIlroy
Correction. Lesk's intro to -ms is at
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/vol2/msmacros.bun
Sorry for the error,
Doug McIlroy
res have been added since, but in
nothing like a ratio of 10,000:1 in utility.
Doug McIlroy
Is there a tool or trick for getting encapsulated postscript from pic?
What I want is that the bounding box should have origin 0 0 and
be just big enough to cover the picture.
Doug McIlroy
> I started a project `contrib/RUNOFF' with documentation.
> ...
> Enjoy.
Where should one look for contrib/RUNOFF?
Doug McIlroy
Bernd,
It's nice to have papers about RUNOFF and its descendants
all in one place. Between runoff and troff came roff,
first for Multics, which was essentially a rewrite of
RUNOFF, then an expanded version for GECOS at Bell Labs,
written first in BCPL, then reimplemented for Unix, and
eventuall
> I can't think of a situation where you would want to mix point sizes
> on a line.
A fairly common case is small caps, as in acronyms. Another is mixed
fonts (e.g. using Courier for computer literals) with different
x-heights for fonts of the same nominal point size.
Doug McIlroy
ranteed to be unique. Why does groff not use the time-honored
$$ to serve the purpose? The only requirement for an absolute
guarantee of uniqueness is that the shell script whose pid $$
represents lives as long as the temporary file.
Doug McIlroy
Being away from home with a mere netbook, I can't really
read Eric's and Peter's insightful remarks in detail. I
need to get back to a printer before doing them justice.
Presentation--at least page size and ease of flipping
pages--matters very much. "Semantics only" is pie in the
sky.
Consider pr
> Man pages are not tutorials or complete manuals
As Federico said, they absolutely should be complete.
Perhaps Gnu's most egregious contribution to Unix
was to turn texinfo with its paleolithic interface
into the "complete" documentation with man pages as
stubs. But perhaps I should be glad that
> I've been emailing PDF files to Windows and MAC types for years.
> [using]
ps2pdfwr -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dUseCIEColor=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer
For normal stuff, including plenty of eqn, pic and PSPIC, I get by with
a mere
ps2pdf file.ps
I'm glad to get the more elaborate recipe in
Other routes to hygien are exemplified by Lint and gcc -Wall.
e
Before jumping headfirst into .hygiene, it would be well to
consider independent style advisors along the lines of Lint or HTML
validators. These have the advantage of not complicating the basic
production software. By contrast, .hygiene is more like -W in
gcc--a thicket of options that can be used
I have just seen that these comments, which have been gestating
for some time, are somewhat outdated by the appearance of mission
statement 3. Still I think they may be of some use.
Mission statement 2 begins with a precis of what groff is, but no |
overt expression of the purpose of the groff
Neither column of the side-by-side display looks very
good to me. The normal-spacing column is definitely
thin. The reduced-spaceing column is patchy--thick
in places and thin (by comparison) in others. I
prefer unjustified text to either. Besides having
more uniform density, it offers landmarks--t
Typography mavens, who have been much in evidence on this mailing
list lately, may appreciate this obituary from The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21598621-mike-parker-typographer-died-february-23rd-aged-84-mike-parker
Equations and displayed quotations are not a problem for the line-breaking
algorithm; they'd all be handled in the macro packages, which would have
the duty to delimit the blocks of text that are to be treated unitarily.
But that doesn't mean we're home free. Line-length changes within such
blocks
> I don't see why any forking should be needed.
I am all ears. I'd love to know a better way to cope with events
that are triggered by line breaks, when several different potential
line breaks are in play, as were discussed in my posting to which
Peter's referred. Forking is certainly unappealing
> In dynamic programming we maintain a set of optimum partial solutions,
> each stored as a node in an acyclic directed graph. Edges of the graph
> indicate from which partial solution an extended partial solution was
> derived.
> Finally we end up with a set of complete solutions, pick the best on
Ulrich wrote, "Please find below ... my attached code."
gnu.org reports "not found" for the strange-looking URL where the
attachment was supposedly stored:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/attachments/20140623/d3f40bfc/attachment.bin
As has been pointed out, underlining by macro is at best inconvenient
in filled text. Thus it was proposed that underline, and perhaps
strike-through might be a groff primitive like .bd. All these capabilities
may be understood as ways to decorate individual characters.
There are other
such thing
Groff is open source. A conscientious author will strive
to make source--the whole source including documentation--as
easily portable as possible. Documentation created in the back
room and distributed only in PDF is the antithesis of open.
I hope "Linux Libertine" is a joke that I don't happen
I had reason today to run groff on an eqn|troff -ms input file
dated Aug 2 1979. It took a 1-character change (missing space
in .in0) to make it work!
Doug
>> [..] I think it's not a bad idea to stay with this scheme for
>> orthogonality:
>>
>> .XXX
>>
>> can be handled by a preprocessor, while
>>
>> .XXX
>>
>> is something only `troff' should process.
I'd put consistency before (largely imagined) orthogonality.
I'm sure that had it been brought
It is safe to convert backslashes to slashes only when it is
known that the literal string is indeed a file name. This
condition holds for command arguments, but not for groff
input text. "Fixing" .lf commands is of a piece with the
maddening AI of Microsoft Word and Open Office, which think
that t
> Thought it might be of interest given troff's
> long-time S\s-2MALL\s0 C\s-2APS\s0, especially used in the formatting of
> Unix. IIRC, Dennis Ritchie said they did it because the CAT gave them
> the possibility, but it was regretted for the UNIX/Unix confusion it
> caused.
I think this is urban
Thanks for the amplification, Meg. That convention was used in
Kernighan's books, and in a few places (but not everywhere) in
the manuals.
> I am very interested in your opinion on what is best, given the trade off
> between how many days to keep, how many to do each day (6, I think) and how
> much space there is on the drive.
I wonder whether it would be practical to gradually thin nbackup coverage
going back in time, to make old
Please accept my apologies for mistakenly sending a family news
file to this mailing list.
Doug
.NP certainly wasn't there in the beginning, and -ms has
been very stable in the 35 years since. If my guess that
it would mean "new page" is right, the feature would be
out of character--why give a new name to an existing
request?
Doug
> I've done some more digging. 7th Ed.'s usr/lib/tmac/tmac.s has `.wh 0 NP'
Good sleuthing, Ralph!
Doug
Clearly the miltary ROFF borrowed a name and many basic features
from roff on Multics. But EQROFF is an intereting innovation. Its
output style is still used by modern math systems like Maple. (I'm
glad, though, that Cherry and Kernighan hadn't seen it when they
set out to do eqn.) There was also
Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
a better definition would have been:
define d2r {($1)*pi/180}
Yes. Macros are expanded by simple textual substitution. They are totally
disconnected from the language syntax. It is a cardinal rule that parameters
which you see as subexpressions in formulas be parenthesized
> And, perhaps most important: It makes execution slower! Contrary to
> TeX, groff doesn't have an internal representation form of macros.
> This means that a macro gets interpreted exactly as written. For
> example, if a macro that contains a line to call a request has 100
> spaces after the lea
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