Re: (Re)setting page and footnote numbers

[Lennart Jablonka]

Quoth Pippo Carmona:
> I am currently making a compilation of technical essays by merging
> multiple pdfs made with Groff.

You can concatenate the troff output before post-processing.

        {
                troff -Tpdf a
                troff -Tpdf b
        } | gropdf >all.pdf

> However, one problem that I have is that
> each chapter is made independently, making each chapter start at page
> 1. So when I merge the chapters, the page number reverts to 1 at the
> beginning of each.
>
> How can I set the page number of a specific file into a set number and 
> increment from thereon? I have tried the man macro -rPnnn but it won't 
> work with my document.

It works with man because man does that.

        .\" …
        .  if r P \{\
        .    ie (\n[nl] = -1) .pn 0\n[P]
        .    el               .nr % 0\n[P]
        .  \}
        .\" …

If you aren’t using man, you can do it yourself.   For every 
document, execute something like

        .if r P .pn \nP

at the start.

> I haven't found the solution to the above so I made another document with all
> the chapters in one .ms file.

Even if you process the whole text at once, it need not be in one 
file.   See the .so request.

> The problem with this is that all footnote
> numbers increment until the end. So, if chapter 1 ends with 18
> footnotes, the footnotes of chapter 2 proceeds with 19. I want each
> chapter's footnotes to start with 1. Can this be accomplished?

You can provide your own footnote markers.