Full text of YASC (actually a n/troff question)

[Dan Ts'o]

In article <mcvax.409> jaap at mcvax.UUCP (Jaap Akkerhuis) writes:
>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

Well, that probably isn't the problem. The probable problem is "documented"
in an obscure sentence in the MS documentation. You often need to follow
the .nr command with the corresponding nroff command in order to get an
immediate effect since the .nr simply changes the value of a number register
used by MS and MS won't recognize the change until it is "entered" by a
real MS macro like .PP . Thus you often want:

	.nr LL 7.5i
	.ll 7.5i

						Dan