Re: One Page Dungeon Layout in groff?

[John Gardner]

This is what pic(1) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIC_(markup_language)>
is for:

# Long version
$ pic < dungeon.roff | troff -Tpdf | gropdf > map.pdf

# Concise version (recommended)
$ groff -p -Tpdf dungeon.roff > map.pdf

If you're new to pic(1), there's a browser-friendly (albeit limited)
reimplementation of the program called Pikchr <https://pikchr.org/home>
that supports live rendering <https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow>. Good for
practice, but poor for troff-quality output.

Regards,
— John

On Sat, 13 Aug 2022 at 18:57, Laurens Kils-Hütten <lkh@betola.de> wrote:

> Hello dungeon delving GNU people,
>
> I hope it's fine to write a lengthy request like the following
> as a first post to this list. If not, please be so kind and
> advise me, where I should have asked instead. That said, here
> goes my question:
>
> Yesterday I once more discoverered, how ridiculously fast groff
> is compared to other typesetting toolchains like LaTeX, Python +
> weasyprint or whatever.
>
> Since I enjoy using fast UNIX tools to build some dungeons in my
> spare time, I wonder how much work it'll take to reproduce the
> classic One Page Dungeon layout in groff. Just in case you don't
> know, the layout would simply look like this:
>
> -------------------------------
> | ---------------  Table with  |
> ||               | random      |
> ||  Map of the   | encounters, |
> ||               | various     |
> ||    Dungeon    | general     |
> ||               | descriptions|
> ||     Level     | of the level|
> ||               | And finally |
> | ---------------  a key with  |
> | descriptions of each         |
> | individual room of the       |
> | dungeon. Basically it's a    |
> | page, with one top-left      |
> | aligned image and text       |
> | floating around the image.   |
> | That shouldn't be too hard.  |
> | Nothing fancy really ...     |
> --------------------------------
>
> The text might extend to the facing uneven page, thus creating a
> two page spread for the level.
>
> Of course I tried what groff seems to deliver out of the box, but
> I find that displays typically use up a page width, or column
> width, with text continuing below the image, but not floating
> around the image like i've shown.
>
> So, any ideas how to do this in groff? Maybe one of the common
> macro packages already supports this kind of layout, only I
> haven't discoverered it, yet?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> cheers,
>
> ~lkh
>
> --
> https://sdf-eu.org/~lkh
>
>