Re: Vim typesetting [Was: Re: vim is no text editor, it's a multipurpose UI and I wish it

dvalin:

> Does anyone know an easy way to make groff gener-
> ate multipage PS or PDF output?

GNU Troff can certaily generate multipage output,
and the majority of packates support this, incliding
-ms, -mm, and -mom, and I think -man as well.

> Around 40 years ago, I used "mpage" to portrait
> two A5 pages onto landscape A4, even double sided,
> so I could print a compact manual on an A4 print-
> er.

I have done the same, but much more recently, with
MS Word, Adobe PageMakes, LaTeX, and GNU Troff. I
had a script to generate the correct page-numbeer
sequeces, but with Groff and PostScript I use psnup
and psbook from psutils:

<https://github.com/rrthomas/psutils>

> I figure I can use a handful of lines of Awk to
> preprocess my Vimmed source text to troff direc-
> tives like ".I", and ".B"

You can write *roff directly as it is meant to. It
feels good. If, however, you need very little ex-
cept .I and .B, then you might prefer writing
Markdown[1] and processing your text with something
like Pandoc[2].

> Why groff? Well, Latex and Lout documentation
> seems to be exclusively language specification,
> and at 70, reams of that takes too long to climb
> on top of.

I am much younger, but have done the same: tried La-
TeX, found it too hard, moved on to Groff and never
regretted it. *roff is so simple that I have been
writing my own macros routinely. For example, I
typeset the CoreOps newsletter, where most of spe-
cial formatting, including text wrapping around ta-
ble and code "displays" is my own:

<https://corewar.co.uk/coreops/coreops02.txt>

I have also produced A5 booklet with a manual to a
thing I wrote for work, but I would rather not show
it publicly.

I have never been able to write a single LaTeX macro
(or whatever they are called), and had to rely on
existing packages, which felt bad -- too much out of
my control.

> This is a superb start, I think:
> <https://josh8.com/blog/typesetting_with_groff.html>
> But multipage would be nifty.

This is one is about the -ms package, which of
course supports multipage documents.

Groff has a great and very friendly community. Do
try its mailing list.

This message is typeset in groff, using my own quote
macros.
____________________
1. <https://commonmark.org/>
2. <https://pandoc.org/>

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