RE: Is decreasing top margin with mm macros broken?

[Michał Kruszewski]

35 years later and it is still there.
Groff is great, much easier and more coherent than Latex.
There is almost no need to google "How to {anything}".
However, the path from the users feedback to the updates is extremely winding.

If fixing bugs or updating was as simple as making a PR on the GitHub/GitLab it 
would probably be much more popular.


Best regards,
Michał Kruszewski

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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Monday, May 17, 2021 11:30 PM, Jeff Conrad <jeff_conrad@msn.com> wrote:

> On Monday, May 17, 2021 1:05 PM, James K. Lowden wrote
>
> > Does anyone how to decrease the top margin with mm macros?
> >
> > > There is VM macro that is supposed to change it, however it
> > > has no effect on the top margin, when one wants to decrease
> > > it. Looks like the top margin can only be increased.
>
> I made the same determination 35 years ago; seemed like a bug even then.
>
> On Monday, May 17, 2021 1:27 PM, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote
> [citing old MM manual]
>
> > To obtain more specialized page titles, the user may redefine
> > the .TP macro to cause the desired header processing.
>
> This is what I did, though my version is still based on AT&T roff, so
> it's not optimal for groff. I added (the unused) registers H and M to
> control the page header and top-of-page margins, respectively. I think
> I used default values of 0.35i and 1i.
>
> That MM version also had a humongous bottom margin, which could not
> be changed, so I similarly added registers F and B for the footer and
> text margins. Because the authors had apparently assumed that no one
> would ever need to change this, it took a bit of hackery to get the
> bottom-of-page stuff to work.
>
> Strange that one should need to resort to this sorta stuff ...
>
> Jeff Conrad