Re: Year 2000 compliance, and other issues

[Werner LEMBERG]

> The yr register stores dates at <current year>-1900, this results in
> 100 being added to what should be a two digit year.

This is a known feature.  A workaround is available since version
1.16.  From groff.info:

  `\n[year]'
     The current year.

  `\n[yr]'
     The current year minus 1900.  Unfortunately, the documentation of
     UNIX Version 7's `troff' had a year 2000 bug: It incorrectly
     claimed that `yr' contains the last two digits of the year.  That
     claim has never been true of either AT&T `troff' or GNU `troff'.

> When generating a Postscript document, the first lines of the page
> will not display if they are not moved down 1 inch from the top of
> the page.  The missing text will display if GhostView is told to use
> a 10x14 size page, rather than a letter sized page.  This problem
> persists even if the page size is given explicitly with the .pg and
> .ll commands.

`.pg' and `.ll' only influence the output dimensions of troff, not the
physical paper dimensions.  Have a look at the groff_font(5) man page
and the file `PROBLEMS' how to set up the paper size.  Note that this
has become much more flexible in 1.19.1.

> Earlier versions of groff did not indent the text on the page by one
> inch when formatting as a postscript document, current versions do.

Hmm, the original troff documentation says that the default value for
the page offset is 1 inch in troff mode and 0 in nroff mode.

> This messes up formatting of earlier documents which assume precise
> positioning of text on the page.  Many documents already have
> margins coded and don't need an additional spacing.  Other documents
> need to use as much of the page width as possible, and the 1 inch
> indent will force the figure off the page (these were forms and
> cut-out templates I created).

Please give a minimal example.


    Werner