Re: [Groff] Get margin of a Postscript file

[Peter Schaffter]

Weighing in on this one...

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012, Robert Thorsby wrote:
> Is it possible that everyone is spending so much time looking at
> the trees that they are not seeing the wood?
> 
> Academic institutions love to receive "standard" manuscripts; it has
> always been so. Usually they specify "A4, single-sided, 12pt
> double-space, 50mm margins all round" or something similar.

And, as has been stated by someone else, if it looks right, they're
not likely to micro-measure.
 
> Now, apply this to a modern anal-retentive academic institution, and
> it will nowadays probably provide an MS Word template and demand
> that everything be submitted in MS doc format using Word and the
> institution-supplied template.

Myself, I find it an awful burden having to create things in .doc
using a word processor when I can do the same thing more efficiently
and with better typographic results using groff.  I've even turned
down work at times because I refused to use Word.  I expect academic
institutions to promote free/open-source/portable solutions to the
exchange of ideas (such as a legal memorandum), and I'm appalled when
they don't.

> The earlier suggestion that you simply check the settings in the
> university's template, to my mind, make sense. You can then create
> appropriate setting for a set of groff macros.

This makes all kinds of sense.  If the university actually checks
each paper for compliance to standards, surely a flat text file
with a .so'd stylesheet, which can be verified with simple glance,
is enough (if they're anal enough to demand seeing it).  The mom
macros would be ideal for this because its registers and strings are
manipulated in macro space, with easily identified macro names that
can be read and understood even by someone unfamiliar with groff.
For example,

.PAPER    A4
.FAMILY   <monospace family of choice>
.PT_SIZE  12
.LS       24
.T_MARGIN 5c
.B_MARGIN 5c
.L_MARGIN 5c
.R_MARGIN 5c

is readable by any educated person.  And since every logical part
of a mom document has "control macros" for family, font, size,
leading, spacing, indent, quad, colour, etc (as appropriate), it is
possible to create very complete templates--probably more complete
and certainly more typographically refined than can be accomplished
with Word.

-- 
Peter Schaffter

Author of The Binbrook Caucus
http://www.schaffter.ca