comment #6:

> I've heard no demand expressed for continuously rendered
> ms/me/mm/mom documents.

Less self-serving instances:

• http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2006-05/msg00102.html
• http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2008-03/msg00012.html
• http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2020-04/msg00072.html

There may well be more, but it's not an easy thing to search because there's no historically consistent terminology for the concept.

Hi Dave,

comment #3:

> This seems like a specific case of the general enhancement bug #61453 seeks.

Possibly we could do some ticket merging here (a manual process involving "closing" as "duplicate", adding cross references in both directions, and updating ticket dependencies), but I conceive of this problem as comprising 3 stages.

1.  Make it possible to represent INT_MAX in register values and decide what to do about overflow (saturating arithmetic, maybe) and update the documentation (bug #64301).
2.  Assign the `.R` register this value by default and update the documentation (bug #63587).
3.  Update the man and mdoc packages to use the mechanism described at the end of comment #0 (this bug).  Blissfully, this would require no documentation update.  It should "just work".

Optimistically yours,
Branden

Hi Bjarni,

comment #1:

>   The examples "lsp-help.1" and "lsp-help.broken.1" render OK
> with the patch in bug #63960, which I installed in my repository
> at that time.

In my opinion, that's a hack.  It extends the page length by one thousand inches, and has to modify a groff man internal register to compensate.  The latter might be fair enough since the patch is to "an.tmac", but it simply doesn't feel as simple and robust as my proposed fix.

On the downside, someone can apply your patch today, whereas this one ultimately requires hardening the formatter's arithmetic expression evaluator.  :-|

But we should be doing that anyway.

Regards,
Branden

The present approach leads to issues like bug #65189, because it's impossible for the macro package to know how long a tbl table will be before formatting it.

At present, continuous rendering is handled by accepting the default page length, and then incrementally growing it as the formatter gets "close" to the page bottom, by setting a trap.

This has been a fragile procedure and I fixed several bugs in it for groff 1.23.0 so that we could get better results when support rendering hundreds of man page documents in one formatter run.

But bug #65189 seems intractable by the foregoing trapping/page-length incrementation approach.  Our trap for breaking the page body before the footer doesn't seem go off inside tbl tables, I think because they are formatted in diversions by default.  (I tried to tell tbl not to use keeps when continuously rendering, but it didn't help cases like lsp-help(1) and ascii(7)).  (The problem may be that text blocks are formatted in diversions no matter what.)

What appears to happen is that output sneaks across a page boundary (as the formatter conceives it) anyway.  This has a couple of negative consequences.

1.  Vertical rules, drawn upward from the table bottom, can show up in the wrong place; this is bug #65189.
2.  Warnings in the "break" category have long been pretty useless with continuously formatted man pages.  Because the page length is variable, the reported page number means nothing.

Here's a reproducer.

$ cat ATTIC/line-too-long.man
.pl 10v \" contrive an artifically short page length
.TH foo 1 2024-01-22 "groff test suite"
.SH Name
foo \- bar
.SH Description
.TS
L.
T{
.nf
1
2
3
4
5
6
T}
T{
.nf
1
2
3
4
5
6
T}
.TE
.P
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890

We get the following warning.

troff:ATTIC/line-too-long.man:28: warning [page 2, line 7]: cannot break line

...which has no relationship to any reality the user can perceive.

$ nroff -t -rLL=65n -man ATTIC/line-too-long.man | cat -n
troff:ATTIC/line-too-long.man:28: warning [page 2, line 7]: cannot break line
     1  foo(1)               General Commands Manual               foo(1)
     2
     3  Name
     4       foo - bar
     5
     6  Description
     7       1
     8       2
     9       3
    10       4
    11       5
    12       6
    13       1
    14       2
    15       3
    16       4
    17       5
    18       6
    19
    20       12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
    21
    22  groff test suite            2024‐01‐22                     foo(1)

Line 7 of what?  Where?

If the page length were unbounded (or practically so), we could radically simplify the implementation of continuous rendering mode, and fix the foregoing problems.

So what we want to do is the moral equivalent of `.pl INT_MAX`.  But thereby hangs a tale...