Re: [Groff] meta macro package

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Unrelated question: when I set the paper size with .pl and .ll and
> friends, how do I tell grodvi and grops to generate the correct
> paper sizes rather than the rather indeterminate size it's
> generating at the moment?

The DVI format itself only stores the maximum of the widths and
heights of all pages.  It knows nothing about the paper size.  If you
need to put in a DVI special (e.g. for communicating with dvips), use
the standard syntax like this:

  TeX format:
    \special{papersize=11in,8.5in}

  equivalent groff code:
    \X'papersize=11in,8.5in}
  or (with groff 1.18):
    .output x X papersize=11in,8.5in

PostScript itself also has no idea about the papersize.  Currently,t
here are no specials to pass the paper dimension to grops, only
command line switches.

After reading the dvips info page I think we could improve grops by
adding

  \X'ps: papersize <height> <width>'

and

  \X'ps: papersize <string>'

the latter uses the predefined paper sizes of the -p option.

According to the Adobe's DSC standard version 3.0, the proper
commands are

  %%DocumentMedia

for the paper defintion and

  %%PageMedia

to select it (%%PageSize shouldn't be used any more according to the
current spec).

I don't think that anything beyond that (e.g. paper tray selection,
support for different papers in a single document) should be part of
grops -- at least I don't have the capabilities to implement that.


    Werner