Re: Best practice to create multi-line footer in letters?

[Dave Kemper]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2024 at 1:44 PM Oliver Corff via GNU roff typesetting
system discussion <groff@gnu.org> wrote:
> In me, adding a footer with .fo 'arg left'arg center'arg right' works as
> expected, with the blatantly obvious limitation that the elements of the
> footer should not contain line breaks.
>
> However, I'd like to have information in two lines

The -me macro package does support a mechanism for defining multi-line
titles (headers or footers).

-me natively implements only single-line footers, but provides a
documented hook to expand this as needed.  On every page, the package
calls a macro named .$f to print the footer, and the documentation
says this macro "may be redefined to provide fancy (e.g., multi-line)
[footers], but doing so loses the function of" some of -me's default
title macros.  (This wording is from an earlier version of the "me
Reference Manual."  Much of the manual has been rewritten starting in
groff 1.23.0, and the information about .$f is, IMHO, now harder to
find (being more dispersed) and less illuminating about its intended
purpose.)

This means that when defining your own .$f macro, you'll probably want
to use the one in the -me package as a starting point and modify it to
suit your needs.  (Be aware, I find the -me code opaque and hard to
follow.  But some trial and error should get you where you want to
go.)

> Since the letters I want to create never have more than one page, I
> could bypass the .fo mechanism.

For your use case, this might be easier.  But if you get a modified
.$f macro working, it also gives you scalability in case you ever need
more than one page.