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Old 9th November 2008
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post
Really? That's very odd. Did you put the .br as the first characters on a line? If you don't, then troff does not interpret it. It is that way for all raw troff dot commands.
I tried it both ways, inline it appears inline as expected (see my last posts code block), and on it's own line in the first column

Code:
.It --interactive, -i
.br
--non-interactive, -b
paragraph text
Which causes the the text after the .br to become part of the paragraph text instead of remaining as part of the list items tag. It seems everything thats not an argument to .It or causes a line break has this fate. Perhaps that's the nature of the .Bl/.It/.El arrangement in mdoc.


Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post
I don't recall your original code, but if I remember properly, you put things on the same line to use the same font command. That's in general not good troff style. You want to use font commands that are independent of text location, so that you can move them around if you want.
Fixed.

I am by no means familiar with troff syntax or common style conventions in formating the commands/macros. Unlike Tex/LaTeX most of what I know comes from reading existing troff files, figuring out what it means (where possible), then comparing the results of test cases to what was expected.


Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post
Manual formatting? The block commands take what is on each line, and honor the line breaks when doing the formatting. That's the idea of using them.
I know, I've just been unable to get the output formated the way I want. I'm very sure it's possible, I just don't know enough troff to pull it off intelligently yet.


I think it's time to steal a few nights off my usual study routines and properly inhale more documentation on troff, to fill out the gaps between what I know how to do in troff, and what I'll eventually need to do with it.the troff users manual should at least help in understanding the syntax better w/o writing test files.
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