Re: Oversized Tables - how to produce non-truncated PDF?

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Oliver,

At 2024-07-18T22:07:33+0200, Oliver Corff wrote:
> after a long period of silence I return.

Welcome back!

> The publication project containing so many tables (yes, my friendly
> tbl primer waits to be finished) is finally coming to a positive end.
> Currently, I am going through the last stages of proofreading. There
> is one problem I fail to solve: some of the huge tables which in my
> original sources spread over two book pages, appear truncated by the
> PDF, no matter what papersize I try to set (e.g. like A3).

Did you try going even bigger, like A2 in landscape orientation?
Because that works for me, with both groff 1.23.0 and Git HEAD
(technically my working copy[1]).

> I attach an example of material cut off at the right margin
> (1985_1006_Politbuero.{tbl,pdf}.
> 
> Arguably, the material displayed in this table could also be expressed
> in other ways, e.g. as an html table (thank you, Ingo, for helping me
> with the conversion from tbl to html!), but there are a few more
> oversized tables in my material and for a multitude of reasons,
> including fidelity to the sources, I do not want to reshuffle the
> appearance of these tables while preserving only their content.

I don't think any of that will be necessary.

> Thank you for any hint!

Here's what I did:

$ groff -t -dpaper=a2l -P -pA2 -P -l ./ATTIC/1985_1006_Politbuero.tbl >| 
politburo.ps
$ evince politburo.ps
$ groff -t -dpaper=a2l -Tpdf -P -pA2 -P -l ./ATTIC/1985_1006_Politbuero.tbl >| 
politburo.pdf
$ evince politburo.pdf
$ ~/groff-stable/bin/groff -t -dpaper=a2l -Tpdf -P -pA2 -P -l 
./ATTIC/1985_1006_Politbuero.tbl >| politburo.pdf
$ evince politburo.pdf
$ ~/groff-stable/bin/groff -t -dpaper=a2l -Tps -P -pA2 -P -l 
./ATTIC/1985_1006_Politbuero.tbl >| politburo.ps
$ evince politburo.ps

Attaching the PDFs generated by groff 1.23.0 and HEAD.[2]

Does this address your issue?[3]

Regards,
Branden

[1] ...but not many changes from origin/master are in this branch yet.

aefbf42b5 (HEAD) [troff]: Refactor has_arg() to support copy mode.
017779a9a [troff]: Fix Savannah #65977 (early `device` req).
e41cbff3d [troff]: Trivially refactor (`get_long_name()`).
c415e26da (origin/master, origin/HEAD) bootstrap: Resync with gnulib upstream.

[2] The generated-by-HEAD attachment is much smaller.  I believe this is
    due to Deri's new font subsetting feature in gropdf(1).

    $ ls -hs1 /tmp/branden/politburo-groff-*
    212K /tmp/branden/politburo-groff-1.23.0.pdf
     40K /tmp/branden/politburo-groff-HEAD.pdf

    That's one of several PDF improvements to boast of in the next groff
    release.

    Incidentally I am reminded that we should probably make gropdf(1)'s
    `-e` option the default behavior since that (inclusion of any font
    resource used) is what the PDF standard now mandates.  Comments?

[3] Meanwhile, emailing this document full of names of GDR leaders has
    tripped U.S. intelligence agency flags and I'll be hunted down by
    President Trump's anti-communist death squads come January.  Guess
    I'd better get groff 1.24 out this year, huh?

politburo-groff-1.23.0.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

politburo-groff-HEAD.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature