[groff] Creating a numbered list without macros

[Yves Cloutier]

Hello,

I'm working on a typesetting tool that provides a layer of abstraction over
groff. Basically it's a groff generator.

For this tool I'd like as much as possible to not use any existing macro
package, but rather use basic primitive commands to generate pure groff.

So far so good, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to make
a numbered list and the math behind it.

For example what would I need to do, using vanilla groff to output a number
followed by suffix, a space, followed by text, and make it so that text
which overflows to the next line gets aligned with the first character of
the text of the lis item.

for example:

...1).This is where the text begins sdfsdfsdfsdfdfdfdfds
.......This is where the line wraps over to.

Where "." = the width of a character (or space).

What approach would I take? Is this something that can be done with tabs? a
combination of indents?

Much appreciated,

yc