Re: Count number of spaces at beginning of line?

[Oliver Corff]

Hi Ralph,

You nailed the provenance of my way of thinking:
> Unlike TeX, where everything is written in TeX, troff favours using a
> preprocessor which produces troff, e.g. pic(1) and tbl(1).  These can be
> quite simple, say an awk script which processes what it recognises and
> passes through the rest.  chem and dformat are both awk scripts:
> https://troff.org/prog.html#chem
>
> Whilst it's interesting to wonder how it can be done in troff, longer
> term you'll probably write preprocessors for this kind of thing.  :-)
> It's common to create ‘little languages’ particular to you using Unix
> programs.

I appreciate your answer, for all practical purposes. Consider my
question a thought experiment.

Thank you,

Oliver.


--
Dr. Oliver Corff
Mail: oliver.corff@email.de