Proper usage of .rd? Tutorial or Example?

[Oliver Corff]

Dear All,

my intention is to write a form letter mechanism that produces invoices.
I want to select from a number of predefined recipients and set up an
invoice which is filled with items like:

Item    Value (EUR)
A    100
B    200
=========
Sum: 300

I thought of using .rd to read Items and Values from stdin, perhaps with
a prompt. If I say

.rd Item

I get the prompt "Item:" and can enter a name. However, the input then
becomes immediate part of the text (analogue to .so).

At the moment I am stuck with passing the values read by .rd to anything
but immediate text. However, I'd like to store the keyboard input read
by .rd to strings so I can construct a tbl with the collected data.

I searched man 7 groff which only states "Read insertion" for .rd, the
texinfo manual has more information but I cannot find information on how
to absorb the input read by .rd into a variable.

Thanks a lot for any hint!

Best,

Oliver.


--
Dr. Oliver Corff
mailto:oliver.corff@email.de