Re: [Groff] Setting different page lengths for troff and nroff

[Mike Bishop]

On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 08:27:29AM -0400, Jon Snader wrote:
> On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 11:32:00AM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > I have a design document that I need to output in two forms: as a
> > properly typeset PostScript file (troff) and in plain text (nroff).  I
> > want the latter not to have page breaks.  I've tried a number of
> > things, but I have two problems:
> > 
> > 1.  I can't find a number register than I can tweak to change the page
> >     height.  The ones I find are read-only and can only be set from
> >     the command line.
> > 
> > 2.  The document contains footnotes.  If I do set a large page size
> >     from the command line, I have to guess it exactly, or I end up
> >     with a footnote separated from the rest of the document by a lot
> >     of white space.
> > 
> > Any ideas?  I'm looking for a solution to my original problem, but it
> > would also be nice to know how to reset page height from within a
> > document.
> > 
> 
> Add a
> 
>     if n .pl 5000
> 
> (or whatever number is large enough to contain your entire
> document) to the beginning of the file.  Now the problem is that
> you will have a bunch of blank lines at the end.  Fix this by
> adding a
> 
>     .if n .pl \n[nl]u
> 
> to the end of the file.  This last trick is from Werner.
> 
> jcs
> 
> 

I frequently email drafts of documents to others who don't like
postscript or need a pdf.  I use mm, don't know if this would
work for other packages--

        nroff -rN2 -rL999 -t -mm <fname> | col -bx | cat -s

Perhaps this helps?

Rgds,
--
Mike Bishop        907/495-5737                 address@hidden
Willow, Alaska