Customizing groff/troff Macros and Other Basics

[sirjofri]

Oh, and by the way: You can also pipe the groff output directly into zathura `groff ... | zathura -` so you don't have to save that pdf file.

[__alfie__]

I use a separate keyboard for my macro keys

[DavidMynors]

Sweet! I'm getting started with my undergraduate dissertation pretty soon so I look forward to seeing how easy it is to reference with a system like this...

[Erel]

If you are into that kind of stuff, read "UNIX Text Processing", O'Reilly. It's available freely online. It took me 15 min to learn enough AWK to make a 50 line program that write groff / -me from plain text or markdown. And I get the same result I got used to with pandoc with it's 1G deps. Old school UNIX ways of doing things is awesome!

[azechele]

Talking about groff without talking about the mom macro is like talking about TeX without talking about LaTeX. Mom is a quite useful attempt at modernizing the troff experience making it really a truly viable alternative to LaTeX. I've switched to groff with mom for every typesetting need I have and never looked back.

[redd_cat]

So many uploads. Which one of us tracked him down and is now holding him hostage?

[AvrittRohwer]

Quick tip: I use the inotifywait binary found in inotify-tools with a shell while loop to recompile (R markdown, in my case) documents on file change. It makes it much more convenient when editing.

[cannedeals]

Wow groff is just getting more impressive! Does it have a great referncing system like LaTeX?

[gabrielborin]

Hey, Luke. Thanks for your videos. I've been experimenting with groff, and when I input text in other languages (Portuguese and Spanish, for the most part), the compiled pdf doesn't look right. How do I add that support for other languages?

Tks

[finndriver]

With the .IP macro, you don't actually need to set the spacing for each element individually, it's inherited from one to the other because it's reading a variable rather than a character.
Also, the extension for macro files is (I believe) .tmac, though it doesn't really matter too much

[akemrir]

Nice introduction video.
You can use ruby with gem guard-shell to automate rebuild based on changes of choosen files. I use this for latex and themes re-generation.

[samanerajacob]

This is seeming more and more like a better alternative to LaTeX. The lack of bloat is really appealing, but the formatting is still a negative for me.

I'm still looking forward to the next video though, you do a great job of explaining stuff without a lot of bullshit added in.

[blixuk]

Hey Luke, I'm really enjoying these videos on groff, could you do one on referencing/citing maybe even quotes. I'm about to write my first university assignment and I was going to use Rmarkdown, but this seems so much better. Thanks in advance.

[ltxr]

The R Markdown/pandoc stuff seemed more convenient though.

[AleksyGrabovski]

You don't need to recompile you document each time manually, just try entr(1) and it will execute any command when you save your file

[finndriver]

I put this on the last video, but could you touch on the -mom macro set (rather than -ms). They are far more powerful, but easier to use than ms.

[mhomssz]

Do you know how to compile a PDF with special characters (like äöü) with groff?

[BubbaLichvar]

You might want to make an augroup to auto compile your documents on buffer write. Something (*very* loosely) like this in your vimrc, or your This way you don't have to keep a separate terminal open and have to continuously switch back and forth to it to compile your documents.

augroup Make_Groff_PDF
autocmd!
autocmd BufWritePost *.{ms, <other groff file types here>} exec ":!groff -ms ".expand('%')." -T pdf > ".expand('<%').".pdf"
augroup END

The `.expand('%')` gets the file name in the current buffer with the file extension and the `.expand('<%')` gets the filename without the file extension.

PS I LOVED your pandoc series, and as a college student, I'm loving this series as well!

[romydrah]

Have you figured out images? I can get the outline of pics but no actual image.

[johncrwarner]

Having problems with numbered lists which I was hoping you'd cover. I am experimenting with Groff to format my recipes and the ingredients are unnumbered - they are fine - the method I number so I did it by hand for my experiment but is there a sneaky method for this?

I used ".IP /<number>" which is not terribly efficient.