Re: One groff file outputting multiple pdfs?

[Richard Morse]

> On Nov 19, 2020, at 5:47 PM, James K. Lowden <jklowden@schemamania.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 19 Nov 2020 15:41:42 -0500
> Richard Morse <pukku@mac.com> wrote:
> 
>> The roff file is being generated by a program, and for a few reasons,
>> it would be much easier to have the program generate one output file,
>> and then run Groff on the single file. Is there someway, perhaps
>> using the mysterious ?I/O? requests, to have the roff file change the
>> output file through out?
> 
> Sounds like a job for awk, Richard?  How is groff supposed to know when
> to start a new output file?  If it's on page breaks, I would read the
> giant file with awk, and begin copying to 1.ms.  When it hits .bp, open
> 2.ms, and so on.  The call groff with the generated inputs using a
> 3-line Make file for parallelism.  

Hi! I was hoping there was some way, internal to groff, that I was just 
missing, to do something like

        .OUT foo
        .LP
        This is a test of
        the emergency broadcasting
        system.
        .bp
        .OUT bar
        .LP
        The previous part went into foo.pdf,
        This will go into bar.pdf.

This would simplify a lot of things, because this kind of thing could be easily 
be put into the roff file when I’m generating that.

But I’m starting to suspect that nobody else has this desire, and so I’m going 
to have to generate 15 different roff files for each time I run this.

Thanks,
Ricky