[9fans] Paper sizes and Troff

[9fans] Paper sizes and Troff

[Devon H. O'Dell]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 620 bytes --]

Is it possible to define the paper size in troff? I've read
Kernighan's troff tutorial and `Typing Documents on the UNIX
System: Using the -ms and -mcs Macros with Troff' by Cherry and
Lesk, but it's not clear to me if there's a way to define a
different paper size.

For instance, I'd like to format a couple of things for A4
paper, which is most frequently used here in my neck of the
woods so-to-speak. From what I can tell, it's possible to change
margins, but I haven't seen any macros in ms(6) or registers
that would enable me to change the width and height of the page
itself.

Tips :)?

--Devon

[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 194 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] Paper sizes and Troff

[Richard Miller]

Paper length is set by .pl command.  Troff has no concept of paper
width; you adjust line length and page offset using .ll and .po
respectively.  If you're using -ms macros which give a line length of
6 inches, try prefixing your input with

  .pl 29.7c
  .po 2.88c

and your text should be centred on an A4 page.

Re: [9fans] Paper sizes and Troff

[dmr]

Richard said,

 > Paper length is set by .pl command.  Troff has no concept of paper
 > width; you adjust line length and page offset using .ll and .po
 > respectively.  If you're using -ms macros which give a line length of
 > 6 inches, try prefixing your input with

 >   .pl 29.7c
 >   .po 2.88c

 > and your text should be centred on an A4 page.

This is true, but be aware that if you're using -ms,
some of these parameters are shadowed by number
registers in the macro package, and tend to
get reset.  In particular, there is a PO and also
a LL number register.  There doesn't seem to
be a PL for .pl shadow, however.

	Dennis

Re: [9fans] Paper sizes and Troff

[Devon H. O'Dell]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1661 bytes --]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 08:20:37PM -0500, dmr@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> Richard said,
> 
>  > Paper length is set by .pl command.  Troff has no concept of paper
>  > width; you adjust line length and page offset using .ll and .po
>  > respectively.  If you're using -ms macros which give a line length of
>  > 6 inches, try prefixing your input with
> 
>  >   .pl 29.7c
>  >   .po 2.88c
> 
>  > and your text should be centred on an A4 page.
> 
> This is true, but be aware that if you're using -ms,
> some of these parameters are shadowed by number
> registers in the macro package, and tend to
> get reset.  In particular, there is a PO and also
> a LL number register.  There doesn't seem to
> be a PL for .pl shadow, however.
> 
> 	Dennis

In which case these should be set by 

.nr LL whatever
.nr PO whatever

I assume. Just for completeness' sake, I also needed to use
bullets, which I could only find in tmac.msc (which changed my
font to one without serifs, which was terrible). Russ gave me
the tip to simply use

.IP \(bu
Some text

to make bulleted lists. This has worked for me just fine and is
a bit less complicated than the macros in -mmsc :). Geoff also
gave me a bit of help with this off-list, so I'd like to
acknowledge that here as well.

Hopefully this thread will come up a bit higher in Google next
time anybody else has this problem :)

I also thought that there was a problem with tr2post when
converting troff to postscript, but it turns out that Acrobat
Distiller was truncating the page size when importing the .ps.
I'll try printing it on A4 soon to see what happens :)

--Devon

[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 194 bytes --]