Re: Register for text width to be used with \l'..'?

[Oliver Corff]

Hi Dave,

thank you very much for pointing out the usefulness of units!

Adding the "u" did the trick.

The simple macro

.de hline
\l'\n[LL]u'
..

.hline

now does the trick, the line length is exactly the same es the text line
length, no problems with truncated divisions anymore.

Best,

Oliver.


On 08/11/2024 17:54, Dave Kemper wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 8, 2024 at 10:20 AM Oliver Corff<oliver.corff@email.de> wrote:
> > \n[LL] produces 468000.
> Yes.  It's not intuitive that registers defined using any other units
> are stored in basic units, and that groff must be explicitly told this
> whenever such values are referenced.
>
> $ cat testfile
> .nr a 4i
> .tm \n[a]
> $ groff testfile
> 288000
>
> The usual way to use such a register is to place a "u" after it, so
> that groff interprets its value as being in basic units.  For example,
> to put four inches of horizontal space on the page:
>
> .nr a 4i
> far\h'\n[a]u'apart
>
> This separates the words "far" and "apart" by four inches.  If you
> omit the "u", \h would insert 288,000 ems (its default unit) of
> horizontal space, which would require a serious horizontal scrollbar
> on your PostScript/PDF viewer.
--

Dr. Oliver Corff
Mail:oliver.corff@email.de