🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <honce.706382992@spso> honce@spso.gsfc.nasa.gov (Jhon Honce) writes:
>I'm writing a set of special macros to handle a small data dictionary.
>One of the fields is the number of characters in a keyword.  I thought
>it would be nice to make the computer count this instead of the person
>filling in the form.
>
>This has turned out to be much more painful than I thought and I would
>like some new ideas.  Assuming someone has some to give away.  ;-)
>
>Using the \w function I can get a number that is the numerical width of
>the string in basic units, eg.
>
>	.nr keywrdlen (+\\w'\\$1')


you've got a start on the problem, but now you've got to translate
the widths of a string into a normalized set of units, then divide
the string's width by the width of a single (normalized) character.
Normalized, in this case, can mean "constant width".  So:

.de x
.nr y \\w"\f(CW\\$1\fR"            \" length of string in units
.nr z \\w"\f(CWx\fR"               \" length of a character in units
.nr x \\ny/\\nz                    \" turn into number of characters
.tm the length of "\\$1" is \\nx
..

is a macro that will tell you the character length of its first argument,
so:

.x "this is the beginning of the end"
the length of "this is the beginning of the end" is 32


Fred