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RE: [Groff] scaling in pic
From: |
Ted Harding |
Subject: |
RE: [Groff] scaling in pic |
Date: |
Tue, 04 Sep 2001 12:40:29 +0100 (BST) |
On 04-Sep-01 Peter Gerbrandt wrote:
> Hi Ted
>
> thanks for your answer.
> I want to build tables with pic. I have an "original" (Excel) and I
> want to reproduce that in pic. With one table per page it worked, but I
> want to have more than one table per page like it is on the original.
> When I put the tables together the words are bigger than the cells and
> that doesn't look very nice.
Hi Peter,
I see. Two comments (in different directions).
1. Unless the table is an unusual one, or you want to produce
special effects, I would not use 'pic' for this, but 'tbl'
instead. You can export the table from Excel in, say, CSV
format. Then you convert (using say 'sed' or 'awk') so that
the delimiter is what you want to use in 'tbl' (I like to
to use "#" or "@" rather than "TAB", the default). Then you
wrap the whole thing between ".TS" and ".TE" and it should
come out as you want. You can put boxes round table cells
or blocks of cells in 'pic', though non-systematic boxing
can be intricate to set up.
2. However, if you insist on using 'pic' to present tabular
information in boxes, then indeed there is a problem with
the fact that text can run outside the boxes.
The reason for this is that, normally, 'pic' is run as
a pre-processor (i.e. it converts the pic-language description
into troff code before troff sees it). At this stage, 'pic'
itself does not know what the size of a text block is: only
troff can do that!
Nevertheless, there is a way of running 'pic' "in-line",
i.e. breaking out of troff and running 'pic'. This gets round
the problem, because you can make troff calculate the size of
the text block that it has to draw a box round, save this info
in nunber registers, and then use these number registers to
create 'pic' commands which request boxes of the right size.
These are then processed by the "inline" run of 'pic', and
the resulting 'pic output can then be pulled back into 'troff'
to be formatted.
It is a bit complicated to explain exactly how to do this
in a general reply, but I could demonstrate it if you would
send a small example of what you want to do.
(It might also help, if you are considering method (1), to send
an example anyway, in case there are special things that need
to be done with 'tbl').
Best wishes,
Ted.
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Date: 04-Sep-01 Time: 12:40:29
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