nroff page length

[Steve Friedl]

This thread has focussed on how to get nroff to deal with printers like
the HP LaserJet that do not have 66-line pages, and in general trying to
format your work for (say) 60 line pages is A Big Mistake.  The main reason
is that it probably makes your nroff source nonportable and means that
things won't look like everybody else's man pages who count on 66 lines.
It will also give you top and bottom margins that are too large.

A muchmuch better way is to fool nroff into thinking that the printer does
in fact support 66 lines, and you can do this with clever term driver hacking
or a postprocessor.  Remember, most documents don't use the absolute full
printable area of the page -- they have top and bottom margins -- and these
are usually larger margins than the physical ones imposed by the printer.

The way to do this is to tell the LaserJet to move its "cursor" to the very
very top of the page with a cursor-motion command  ESC&a-360V  and then to
use relative-motion commands for each linefeed.  Now your LaserJet is
a 66-line top-to-bottom page, with the first and last few lines printed
with white toner.

I have implemented solutions like this for a number of customers, and word
processor drivers (WordPerfect, for instance) use it as well.  I would try
it on my printer now, but it has the miserable Adobe ljet emulation that
is worthless for this kind of compatibility testing :-(

     Steve

-- 
Stephen J. Friedl, KA8CMY / I speak for me only / Tustin, CA / 3B2-kind-of-guy
+1 714 544 6561  / friedl at mtndew.Tustin.CA.US  / {uunet,attmail}!mtndew!friedl

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