Hi Bento, You might not be subscribed to the list; your message was held for moderation. Fortunately someone (possibly Werner) approved it.
At 2026-10-20T16:11:22-0300, Bento Borges Schirmer wrote:
> I went on to format a curriculum vitae. I chose mm because its man
> page describes the macros .MULB/.MULN/.MULE to type text in columns
> with varying widths. However it bugs when an unumbered heading is
> added with .HU to the second column.
Yes, it seems so!
> I did not test it thoroughly, but please find attached a reproducible
> example, plus a resulting PDF.
>
> Command line:
>
> $ groff -rN4 -rL29.7c -rO1.5c -rS12 -rW18c -P-pa4 -ww -Kutf8 -Tpdf -t
> -mm cv.mm > cv.pdf
>
> Tested groff version: 1.23.0
I can reproduce the ugly layout with 1.23.0, 1.22.4, and 1.22.3. So
this is a pretty old bug.
> I installed version 1.24.2, marked as "testing" on Gentoo, but for my
> example it says:
>
> m.tmac:cv.mm:2: error: MULN: not in multi-column mode
>
> and exits with status 4.
Right. All errors in groff mm are fatal. (Non-fatal "error"s are
reported as "warning"s.) So troff exited with a nonzero status.
> I can't tell if I've been misusing the macro.
It doesn't look like it to me, but MULB/MULN/MULE were Jörgen Hägg's
invention, so there's no other implementation to compare the feature to.
> Despite the bug, I was able to format the CV. For headings I just
> created a macro that applies bold and changes point size (.B and .S),
> and everything else I used didn't bug the columns.
That's a relief. I don't think we need to gate the 1.25.0 release on
this issue. I'm glad you can still get your work done despite these
defects.
There are likely at least two bugs here.
1. The error diagnostic makes no damn sense.
2. We shouldn't be overprinting text in multi-column mode (or
single-column mode, for that matter) unless the input document jumps
through hoops to make that happen. Clearly some math is off
somewhere, and would appear to have been for at least a decade.
Thanks for the report.
Regards,
Branden
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