Robert Thorsby <rob...@thorsby.com.au> wrote: |Temperatures here in AU have been in the range 35-45 for the past week |and are forecast to be the same for the next week. So with no |inclination towards serious work I have turned my attention to |rewriting my letterhead shell script, as one does.
And you have all those poisoning animals down there, too! Luckily the great reef is already almost dead... |My letters carry the date in full -- Thursday, 25 January 2018 -- which |is placed into the preamble of the groff file via my shell script: | |date --date="..." "+.ds DATE*FULL %A, %-d %B %Y" >> draftletter.gr | |But occasionally I also want to use the date in a ``shorter'' version |that depends on the ``full'' version. I appreciate that I can simply |create two definitions, but once defined they would be independent of |each other. ... |Can anyone assist with proper groff request(s) to replace the bashism |so that any amendment to DATE*FULL is carried through automagically to |DATE*SHORT? I don't use any macro package. I would use the fantastic possibility the wonderful Werner Lemberg added to groff, strings with arguments: .ds template Thursday 25 January 2018 .ds full \\$* .ds short \\$1 \\$3 .ds DATE*FULL \\*[full \*[template]] .ds DATE*SHORT \*[short \*[template]] full \*[DATE*FULL] short \*[DATE*SHORT] Hope this helps, Ciao from Germany under west stream (mild) --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)
