Re: [Groff] Setting different page lengths for troff and nroff

[Jon Snader]

On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 11:32:00AM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> I have a design document that I need to output in two forms: as a
> properly typeset PostScript file (troff) and in plain text (nroff).  I
> want the latter not to have page breaks.  I've tried a number of
> things, but I have two problems:
> 
> 1.  I can't find a number register than I can tweak to change the page
>     height.  The ones I find are read-only and can only be set from
>     the command line.
> 
> 2.  The document contains footnotes.  If I do set a large page size
>     from the command line, I have to guess it exactly, or I end up
>     with a footnote separated from the rest of the document by a lot
>     of white space.
> 
> Any ideas?  I'm looking for a solution to my original problem, but it
> would also be nice to know how to reset page height from within a
> document.
> 

Add a

    if n .pl 5000

(or whatever number is large enough to contain your entire
document) to the beginning of the file.  Now the problem is that
you will have a bunch of blank lines at the end.  Fix this by
adding a

    .if n .pl \n[nl]u

to the end of the file.  This last trick is from Werner.

jcs