[bug #55081] me: two-column output does not work with very long page lengths

[Dave]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?55081>

                 Summary: me: two-column output does not work with very long
page lengths
                 Project: GNU troff
            Submitted by: barx
            Submitted on: Fri 23 Nov 2018 04:44:53 PM CST
                Category: Macro - others
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Incorrect behaviour
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

I discovered this bug on groff 1.22.2, but it is also present in a groff built
from the latest source in git.

For nroff output, it is often desirable to eliminate "page" breaks for text
meant to be read in a pager such as "less."  The groff info manual gives
advice on how to do this: "set the page length at the beginning of the
document to a very large value."

However, this breaks -me's two-column macros.

.pl 158
.2c
Column 1.
.bc
Column 2.

Pipe the above into "nroff -me | grep ." and the output is as expected:

Column 1.                       Column 2.

But change the 158 to any higher number, and the columns are no longer output
correctly:

Column 1.
Column 2.

This puts an unreasonable upper limit on the very large value one can specify
to accommodate nroff output.




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