[9fans] troff diversions

[9fans] troff diversions

[Gregory Pavelcak]

I think of myself as pretty proficient with troff, but I never get
diversions right.

One fairly useless task I set for myself was to write a smart quote
macro. By that I mean that I want the macro to put the quoted text
into a diversion, check how many lines the quote would be when
formatted as a block quote, and then output a block quote if the
number of lines is >= block-quote-threshhold or output an
inline quote if it's not.

Actually this is not so useless if you are writing something that may
or may not be published in a variety of places that have different
page layout conventions for block quotes, and you're a lazy person
who doesn't want to make adjustments to even the rare borderline
case by hand.

Do you see what I have in mind? Any ides on how to achieve it?

Thanks.

Greg