Re: [Groff] Included files are not preprocessed

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> Nevertheless, I think it would be better then to store both
> a tmac.<foo>-raw file and a preprocessed tmac.<foo>.

>From what I've read, the old Bell Labs [nt]roff had an option
to read macro files in a sort of "compiled" version (to reduce
startup time), so if one used this feature it would have been
useful to install the compiled version of the *preprocessed*
macro file.  But this is probably irrelevant for groff.


> Maybe a convention similar to that used for man pages --
> list required preprocessors on the first line of the source
> in a comment -- would  be better?

Interesting that you mention this, because that's exactly
what I usually do (inspired by man, of course).  That is,
I have a shell script "myroff" [*] which reads the first
line of the input file, interprets it as options, and calls
groff accordingly (and also opens/refreshes the gv window
with the output).  You could also use this shell script as
a replacement for the "driver" program groff and build your
own pipeline with it instead.

(It goes without saying that such a script is of course
permanently under construction.)


[*] which, by the way, is bound to <F1> in Vim via

  au BufNewFile,BufRead *.ro map <buffer> <F1> :up<CR>:!myroff "%"<CR><CR>

in my .vimrc (my *roff files are recognized by a ".ro"
(for "runoff") extension).

myroff
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