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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