Re: [Groff] Apparent weirdness with -ms's PO and LL

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Thu Feb  6 08:59:47 2003, address@hidden wrote:
> On 06-Feb-03 James J. Ramsey wrote:
> > Putting
> > 
> > .nr PO 1.25i
> > .nr LL 6i
> > 
> > at the top of the file seems to do nothing, yet if I put
> > 
> > .nr PO 1.25i
> > .nr LL 6i
> > .po \n(POu
> > .ll \n(LLu
> > 
> > I get what I want, a page offset of 1.25 inches and a
> > 6-inch long line.
> > 
> > I would think that at the very top of the file,
> > setting the number registers would be sufficient. Go
> > figure.
> > 
> > What am I missing here?
> 
> What you are missing can only be discovered by working through
> tmac.s in detail, which is not trivial!
> 
...
> a page break occurs. Therefore, the first page is, by default,
> started with the default values which were set when tmac.s was read in
> prior to looking at your document. You can set PO and LL, but these
> will not be referred to until the formatting breaks to the second page.
> Hence the first page is formatted using the default values.

I have more or less the same problem as James, using groff 1.17.2 (Debian
3.0).

Actually, -ms respects LL as soon as it should (at .TL, .PP and other
macros), but I cannot get it to respect PO at all.

.nr PO 5i
.nr LL 15n
.
.TL
No title
.
.LP
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
...
(repeated enough times to fill three pages)

Lesk's original paper on -ms says LL takes effect at
"next paragraph", and PO at next page.  Still, PO has
had no effect in any tests I've performed.  I can imagine
that it would have no effect on the first page in the
example above (I suppose the page has been started before
groff encounters the .TL), but the other pages get a normal
indent as well.

regards,
Jörgen

-- 
  // Jörgen Grahn       "And then the design was ignored, and small children
\X/ <address@hidden>  with crayons were given the O'Reilly Perl books and
                         told to Create.  And lo, it was done."
                                                         -- Teo de H, in ASR