Hi Dave, At 2022-11-19T10:16:30-0600, Dave Kemper wrote: > > * tmac/e.tmac: Integrate better with papersize.tmac by no longer > > forcing line (and title) length to 6 inches for typesetters on > > initialization. > > This is largely a step forward for the -me package, but I have two > minor concerns about it. > > - It puts the package's behavior out of sync with its documentation, > which still states (in the descriptions of the .xl and .ll macros) > that the default line length is 6.0i.
Quite correct. I will fix that.
> - It changes the default line length for the default paper size
> (letter) from 6.0i to 6.5i. This will change the rendering of any
> historical -me documents that use this default.
I did think of this. I rapidly ran into a problem.
I can't _find_ any historical -me documents.
Not apart from "ref.me" and "intro.me".
Anybody have any?
I have similar problems with mm, since it seems the best way to get
one's mitts on those is to have a Tenth Edition Research Unix source
distribution, and I don't.
> This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- 6.0i always seemed a quirky
> default,
Yes; with it and the other defaults, you get a 1 inch left margin and a
1½ inch right margin. I remember when English instructors would savage
your paper and your grade with a fat-tipped red pen for such things.
> and probably many -me documents override it -- but is something -me
> users should be notified of.
Agreed.
> Alternatively, to preserve historical behavior
> but retain the new responsiveness to paper size, rather than
> initializing the line length to \n(.lu, the macro package could
> initialize it to \n(.lu-0.5i.
I think I'd prefer to assume that people want 1 inch margins all around
the page; groff's defaults come close to that.
We copied a truly bizarre default from DWB mm. The page offset is
0.963i. There has to be a story behind that, but I'm less sure that
it's a good one.
me(7) is the only full-service (non-man-page-related) package we ship
that doesn't support configuration of horizontal margins on the command
line. I wonder if we should add this. I suppose we could add `ll` and
`po` registers to configure the (initial) line length and page offset,
and have papersize.tmac assign those if a `paper` string has been
successfully configured.
Here's what that looks like right now.
. ie \n[paper-w] \{\
. tmc papersize.tmac: warning: ignoring unrecognized paper format
. tm1 " '\*[paper-arg]'
. \}
. el \{\
. if !r LL \
. nr LL \n[.l]u \" for ms, mdoc, man
. if !r #R_MARGIN \
. nr R_MARGIN 1i \" for mom
. \" for mm
. if !r W \{\
. nr W \n[.l]u
. if !r O \
. nr O 1i
. \}
. \}
This is written so that a user who uses "-dpaper" on the command line
(or sets it in the troffrc file, as Bjarni recently advised Hans to do),
can still override these dimensions with the appropriate
package-specific registers if they wish.
I have a nefarious post-1.23 idea for adding a flag to nroff to make it
auto-size documents to the terminal window, complete with page offset
manipulation to center the document so people don't have to read
super-long lines even on super-big terminals.
Regards,
Branden
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