Re: Proper usage of .rd? Tutorial or Example?

[Oliver Corff]

Hi onf,

thank you for your example! I'll try it during the next days.

Yes, I am aware of looming complexity issues but I regard this as an
exercise only. I do not want to bulldoze my way forward if it is really
not practical, etc. Let's reword my approach: I only want to see if the
idea is *possible*, practicailty is only a secondary concern.

With regard to the usefulness of the language, my invoices in LaTeX are
actually finite state automata that are completely realized in TeX; the
user provides a title and a number of \Fee{}{}{} lines, once these end
the program constructs everything from table header to table body around
it. It was not even complicated. I think that the same thing is possible
and feasible in groff.

Best, Oliver.


On 03/12/2024 23:26, onf wrote:
> Hi Oliver,
>
> On Tue Dec 3, 2024 at 9:57 PM CET, Oliver Corff wrote:
> > I thought of precomposed files as well, but what I really want is to
> > make groff collect the necessary data  during the compile run by
> > prompting the user at the CLI, very much like the original mail user agent.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > I could, of course, also write something in any script language that
> > converts my input into roff data, but I thought it would be nice to have
> > groff do the job directly.
> I realized that it IS actually possible to use .rd to create a string:
>    .de loadvar \" $1 = string name, $2 = prompt
>    . di \\$1
>    . rd \\$2
>    . br
>    . di
>    . unformat \\$1
>    . chop \\$1
>    ..
>    .loadvar name Name
>    .loadvar email Email
>    Your name is \*[name]
>    and your email is \*[email].
>
> However, I think what you are trying to do will end up being
> unnecessarily complex in troff. Creating a script which prompts
> the user and then generates troff syntax and runs troff on the
> user's behalf will be much easier because troff sucks as a general
> purpose programming language.[1] I speak from experience.
>
> ~ onf
>
> [1] Not that TeX is any better in this regard.
--

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