[Groff] PO Initialisation in 'ms' Macros Still Broken

[MARSHALL Keith]

Werner,

This was discussed, at length, some fourteen months ago.

The problem observed, back then, was that any attempt to initialise the PO 
register, before output of the first page had started, was overridden by 
the first page initialisation routine, in the 'ms' macro package.  Some 
patches were proposed at the time, but it would seem that they were never 
applied.

IMHO, this should be fixed, if only to save future generations of groffers 
from having to discover and resolve this problem the hard way, as I have 
just done.

Attached is the patch I have adopted.  This is basically the same solution 
as you yourself proposed, at the time of the original discussion, i.e. to 
change the initialisation routine to make the setup of the PO register 
conditional on its not having been previously defined.  However, your 
original proposal was insufficient to apply an initial PO setting to the 
cover page of a 'released paper' format document; to achieve that, I have 
included an additional minor change in the RP macro definition.

AFAICT, the effect of these changes makes to behaviour of groff-ms 
consistent with that which I observe on a SunOS 5.2 box, using the native 
troff and ms macros of that platform.  There is just one minor difference, 
which could be viewed as an advantage: the conditional initialisation of 
PO in groff-ms allows it to be predefined on the command line; the SunOS 
implementation does not allow this.

Best regards,
Keith.

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