Hi Dorai, > I did a relative set of the PO (page-offset) register at the head of > an ms document > .nr PO -.25i > (I.e., I wanted it to be a quarter-inch less than its default value.)
That decrements PO by ¼". See http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Setting-Registers.html#Setting-Registers I expect PO isn't defined when you do this, so is treated like zero and you get -0.25". > Surprisingly to me, even though this statement was placed only once, > at the beginning of the document, its effect seems to be repeated at > every page turn, giving smaller and smaller PO's for every successive > page. This doesn't seem intuitive at all. What gives? ms does `.po \\n[PO]u', and PO is negative, you've set it to -0.25", so the current value is decremented by that much, see http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Line-Layout.html#Line-Layout ms does not set the page offset to its default value and then apply PO as an offset once. Instead, it sets the page offset to PO, it just happens that if PO is negative then .po adjusts the existing offset. If you look at s.tmac, you'll see \n(.o is used if \n(PO isn't set. You could use that to come up with a positive `default less ¼"' for PO? Cheers, Ralph.
