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


From: Oliver Corff
Subject: Re: Oversized Tables - how to produce non-truncated PDF?
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2024 07:52:45 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird

Hi Branden,

thank you for everything!

At the moment I cannot recall whether I even tried A2. Something along
the process chain did not seem to work well, but as the attempts to
create these behemoths took place approx. 3 years ago I do not remember
exactly the command setup and, in case of failure, its specific failure
mode.

While most of the approx. 1.200 tables of my project fit well on one
sheet, I had a batch process (or rather, a system call from inside a
perl script that converted the table to every desired output format on
the fly). The big ones are just a handful and I never bothered to make a
shell script which auto-adjusts for the size of the table.

Best regards,

Oliver.


On 18/07/2024 23:13, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
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?

--
Dr. Oliver Corff
Wittelsbacherstr. 5A
10707 Berlin
GERMANY
Tel.: +49-30-85727260
mailto:oliver.corff@email.de




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