Re: [Groff] Filofax Calendar

[Robert Thorsby]

On 2004.11.27 08:05 John Poltorak wrote:
> I guess my question consists of two parts:-
>
> Can I use GROFF to create a diary?

I have just made a traditional calendar using groff where each day 
contains a tide chart. Groff was used as the layout engine and the 
actual contents were generated using the xtide application, the cal 
application and a bash script.

Briefly, my method was to create each different page layout (in my 
case, four) by hand (ie, in a text editor). Each of those files, which 
are ordinary text files, consisted of slabs of static text including 
static markup text interspersed with chunks of dynamic text (ie, 
contents generated by other applications). The bash script called the 
various applications, manipulated their output (using mainly sed and 
awk), and then assembled the "raw" groff files (in my case, 13 of 
them). Finally, the bash script processed each of the output files 
through groff either to produce postscipt files for later printing or 
to print directly to a postscript printer.

> Does GROFF support the Filofax paper size?

Groff "merely" turns ordinary text into postscript (or a number of 
other languages and formats) and, therefore, anything that can be done 
in the destination language or format can be done via groff -- although 
you may need guru status (or a lot of help) to do some things. So, like 
postscript, groff supports by description many (most) imperial, metric 
and US paper sizes and, in addition, it supports by specifying 
dimensions ANY paper size.

HTH,
Robert Thorsby