Re: [Groff] groff -mm output something I don't expect

[Nick Stoughton]

On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 19:38 -0500, Luke Huang wrote:
> Wow,  there were  so many  masters  of troff/groff  answering my  stupid
> question. Thanks a lot.
> 
> You  are all  right,  ``mm'' macro  of  the newest  groff has  *NOTHING*
> wrong. However,  current version of evince  does its job  as well. After
> one  day's inverstigation,  I found  the problem  is caused  by  the old
> ``mmt'' macro shipped with OpenSolaris.
> 
When I first saw your message, the first thing I thought of was those
cut-marks that where on the first version of DWB mm ... but then
discarded that thought as "those went away before Noah left the ark ...
can't be that!"

This is a feature of the original mm macro set, intended to show where
to cut a continuous sheet of paper into individual pages!


> So, why  does groff use the old  ``mmt'' instead of its  m.tmac. I found
> that  when I  run ``configure  ;  make ;  make install'',  if there  are
> already  macros under  /usr/share/lib/tmac,  groff will  not generate  a
> m.tmac    file,    instead,     it    always    uses    ``mmt''    under
> /usr/share/lib/tmac. As a workaround, I run ``groff -mgm hello.mm'' that
> generate an expected postscript file.  The different between two ps file
> are:
> 
> $ diff hello.ps ~/tmp/hello.ps 
> 3c3
> < %%CreationDate: Fri Nov 14 17:07:26 2008
> ---
> > %%CreationDate: Fri Nov 14 11:24:46 2008
> 233,234c233,234
> < /F0 10/address@hidden SF 524.18(-- --)0 10 R 2.5(-1-)277.006 58 S
> < (Hello w)69.336 106 Q(orld!)-.1 E 524.18(-- --)0 801.5 R 0 Cg EP
> ---
> > /F0 10/address@hidden SF 2.5(-1-)277.006 48 S(Hello w)69.336 96 Q(orld!)
> > -.1 E 0 Cg EP
> 
> You can see that, the ``mmt'' version has a line:
> 
> /F0 10/address@hidden SF 524.18(-- --)0 10 R 2.5(-1-)277.006 58 S
> 
> this results in the two short bars I mentioned.
> 
> Another  workaround might  be ``mv''  or ``rm''  /usr/share/lib/tmac and
> then  build groff,  from then  on, groff  will always  use its  mm macro
> package.
> 
> The ``mmt'' macro shipped with  Heirloom generates the two short bars as
> well. To  me it seems that  this macro has  this issue for a  long time.
> suprisingly,  nobody  has complained  about  or  asked  this issue.  
> 
> Thanks again
> Luke