On 09/07/19 12:30:56, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
Kirill S Sapelkin wrote on Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 07:19:17PM -0700:
> Could not find a way to automaticaly insert the date at compile
time other than:
>
> .DATE
> .sy date '+%e %B %Y' > dater
> .so dater
> .sy rm dater
Logically, inserting the date at compile time doesn't really make
sense. You don't want the date of compiling there, you want the date
the letter was written and originally sent. So there is really value
in having the author enter the date manually.
I can endorse Ingo's remarks with a personal horror story. When
FrameMaker was release for Windows I played with it, including the
automatic date feature. After a document had been finalised, every
time I opened it thereafter the date changed -- nasty when I printed a
copy of a letter I had sent some weeks earlier only to discover it bore
the current date.
I've been gunshy ever since.
Nowadays, (a) I don't use FrameMaker, (b) I don't use Windows, and (c)
in groff I define the date as a string in the preamble.
Robert
