I'll take another easy one: > > 3) Is the `-dpaper` option the proper way to set the paper size? > > Are there more proper ways?
There's two parts to this. First, the typesetter itself (which has to decide where to place each letter of your text) has to know how large the paper is and how large you want the margins to be. Second, the postprocessor (which prepares the actual device-dependent output file) has to know what paper size to request from the device. In principle, the two are independent: you can format a document for A5 and print it on A4 paper. Telling the typesetter what paper size you want depends on what macros (if any) you use for your document. Check the documentation for that macro package. Some of them will evaluate variables set on the command line with "-d", but not all of them do. However, they usually provide macros or number registers to specify the paper size and margins. If you're running bare-bones without a macro package, use the ".pl", ".po", and ".ll" formatter requests to specify paper length, page offset, and line length. The postprocessors usually have a "-p" option for requesting a particular paper size. To pass this option to the postprocessor from the groff driver, use groff's "-P" option, for example, groff -Tps -P -pa4 ... To get a properly formatted document on the correct paper size, you have to tell both the typesetter and the postprocessor what size you want.
