Re: About groff and dformat

[Riza Dindir]

Hello Dave

Thanks for the information on the # character. Will use that if
needed. But I have solved the issue with the chem/dformat interference
with a script.

I have written an awk script that will make chem only process its own
region. This worked and has eliminated the problems with the other
preprocessors. Until the groff chem package is updated, and the port
to my system is available, I can use this.

Although I do not have a requirement to use chem in my documents (I am
not a chemist, or anything).

The reason for all this was to test all the preprocessors and have
these in one document, to see how groff would do. I did not want to
use TeX or LaTeX. I think that they are too much for my purposes and
wanted a lightweight alternative. Troff is one of these alternatives,
and comes on unix and unix like systems as default (mostly).

I think that groff does a good job of creating documents. And I am
using the ms macro package and it looks good. I can even have diagrams
with PIC, although I would need some pic definitions to make my
diagrams, but it is all in there. I even can include png images into
the document by simply converting the png into a ps and including it
in the generated postscript file with a macro supplied by grops.

In conclusion, troff/groff is a good alternative for creating documents.

Regards
Riza

On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 4:28 PM Dave Kemper <saint.snit@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 8/17/22, Riza Dindir <riza.dindir@gmail.com> wrote:
> > When you use chem, you can not have
> > the # character in the dformat or other preprocessor blocks, since the
> > chem macro package does take # as a comment and erases all the
> > characters to the end of the line.
>
> For anyone else who's run into trouble with this, Riza has filed
> http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62909 to try to make chem less
> aggressive.
>
> > Or will the control sequence \N'35' always be mapped to the character #?
>
> That's relatively safe, but groff also provides the escape sequence
> \[sh] for that character.