Re: [Groff] Refer Usage Question

[Joerg van den Hoff]

Frank Jahnke wrote:
> I use refer a lot to process references in [gt]roff.  I have been unable
> to figure out how to handle the groupings of references.  An example
> would be:
>
> The flux capacitor has been studied widely [7-23] after the pioneering
> work of Smith [11-15]...
>
> where those references are listed at the end of the document.  
>
> It is easy to have the references listed as [7, 8, 9, and so on] after
> they are cited.  Is there a way to do this without suppressing the
> reference in the text body and putting it in manually?
>
> Frank

yes, their is a way (and to be fair, it _is_ in the manpage of refer 
and one can understand that passage without making it a project of it's 
own -- which is not the case with other parts of the manpage,
I'm afraid :-) ):

I use the following refer settings regularly (with -ms macros)

.R1
search-truncate 255
accumulate
bracket-label " [" "]" ", "
abbreviate-label-ranges
reverse A
sort A
sort-adjacent-labels
move-punctuation
join-authors " and " ", " ", "
.R2


the relevant command is `abbreviate-label-ranges' (see manpage for the 
details).


joerg