Full text of YASC (n/troff stuff)

[Spyridon Triantafyllopoulos]

Newsgroups: net.unix

In article <199 at usl.UUCP> sigma at usl.UUCP (Spyridon Triantafyllopoulos) writes:
	>How do you change the line length
	>in the macro package "-ms" ? I tried
	>the .nr LL 7.5 or others, and it 
	>would not work.
	> .....
	>P.S Enter it to the stupid question
	>of the year award, but our local nroff
	>and macro guru is on vacation...

>>Looks like a nice entry. Why don't you read the manual? Although it
>>might look a bit obscure in the N/Troff manual, you would have found
>>out that the .nr request will take default values as units.
>>Guessing that you want to change the line length to 7.5 Pica's,
>>you should have said:
	.nr LL 7.5P

I think the real mistake lies in the attempt to specify line length
in INCHES (You ethnocentrist Americans :-)), rather than, the most 
reasonable CHARACTERS. I have been using Honeywell's "runoff" text   
processing system on a 68/80 Multics for a long time and all arguments
are in number of characters or line. Same thing on the WORDIX word processing
system on the IBM PC/XT. The documentation IS cryptic, and 
No one says that you have to use the little "i". I got it all OK 
now, but I guess I'm going to implement macros for Multics runoff.
It's a pity, n/troff has such a potential but screwy docs....

-- Spiros

Spiros Triantafyllopoulos  <> USENET {ut-sally, akgua}!usl!sigma
Computer Science Dept, USL <> CSNet  TriantafyllopoulosS%usl at csnet-relay.ARPA

             "This file contains no opinions whatsoever"