"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> a écrit : > Hi Jan, > > At 2024-04-24T07:53:51+0200, Jan Eden wrote: >> On 2024-04-24 00:07, G. Branden Robinson wrote: >> > At 2024-04-21T23:52:48-0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: >> > > For mm, what I would do is set up the mounting positions to replace >> > > Times with Helvetica. >> > > >> > > .fp 1 HR >> > > .fp 2 HI >> > > .fp 3 HB >> > > .fp 4 HBI
Hello Branden, This question is naive but why isn’t .fam implemented as a wrapping to the .fp macro like: .de fam .fp 1 R \\$1R .fp 2 I \\$1I .fp 3 B \\$1B .fp 4 BI \\$1BI .. Of course this doesn’t implement the capability of going to the previous font family with an empty .fam call. >> > >> > I retract this advice. Using ".fam H" early in the document (in >> > groff 1.23.0) is better. >> >> This did not work in groff 1.23.0 for the header/footer issue (with >> `.fam H` as the very first request in the document), I had to use both >> requests – >> >> .fam H >> .fp 1 H >> >> – as suggested by Thomas. > > Ah, right. Okay. I un-retract the advice. Yes, Thomas was right. > > The reason is that, quite apart from environment issues, groff mm is > faithful to the DWB mm tradition in that internally it refers to fonts > by mounting position rather than a named style, even though it has > cognizance of only one family.[1] Jörgen Hägg, the author groff mm, > appears to have added some limited support for switching the font family > to his multicolumn macro extensions, MULB/MULN/MULE, but it's not clear > to me exactly how they work. (Rather, I can read and understand the > requests just fine but I'm not sure they're necessary...? Perhaps this > was the beginning of an unfinished idea.) > > This fact is totally separate from the environment stuff I was talking > about earlier because, as I noted previously, the list of font mounting > positions is global, and consistent among all environments. > > The concept of mounting positions is a fairly baroque aspect of troff > and completely, as far as I know, a consequence of the hardware design > of the C/A/T phototypesetter used by the Bell Labs CSRG. They used this > indirection to refer to fonts because the machine itself did. You > didn't have any idea what font's photographic plate would be loaded into > the various positions of the typesetter's mechanical carousel. One of > your co-workers could scramble their order, ruining your document and > you had no way of knowing until it was printed. > > I expect this didn't happen often, not with the imploding gaze of an > office balrog to fear... > > I would prefer to wean groff mm off of explicit use of mounting > positions altogether, but doing so is not a high-urgency project. > (This also means it's good task for a contributor who wants a modestly > sized project to learn with. :) ) > > Regards, > Branden > > [1] I grepped and could find _no_ matches in our m.tmac for `ft [BIR]`, > `\\f[BIR] or `\\f\[[BIR]\]`. Replacing "BIR" with "123" is more > fruitful. -- Thomas