Neat little alias & technique to facilite troff

[jhv at houxu.UUCP]

In article <595 at cubsvax.UUCP>, peters at cubsvax.UUCP (Peter S. Shenkin) writes:
> First I put this alias in my .login:
> 	alias roff 'sed -e 1s/\.\.// -e 1s/@/!*/ -e 2,\$d !* | sh &'
> Then I begin each troff source file with a line like:
> 	..eqn @ | ltroff -me

My approach is to use the shell's "here-document" capability, putting the
command line  to format the document as the first line of the document, and
executing the file when I need processed output, for example (to include
tbl, eqn, and pic preprocessors and to print the output on an Imagen
printer):
	tbl <<!EOF | eqn | pic | troff -mm | ipr -ltroff
	...
	!EOF
Then either make the file executable with chmod, or type sh filename to get
the formatted output.