Re: missing -Tpdf (and the curious case of mandoc_roff(7))

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Doug,

At 2023-07-29T15:16:42-0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> Cygwin did exclude gropdf and pdfgroff. "The accompanying man page"
> that I meant was groff.1. Perhaps that man page should say that not
> all groff distributions support pdf.

Okay.  I want to keep groff(1)'s comprehensive list of man pages, and
not generate variants of it at build time depending on configuration
options.  But a note as you suggest is going to be more reliable than
trusting distributors to patch the man pages to reflect their own
configurations.

Off the top of my head, configuration options affect the availability
of gropdf(1), grohtml(1), gxditview(1), and xtotroff(1).

Not precisely related, but to get it on record on the groff mailing
list, I've noticed while observing 1.23.0 uptake that some distributors
discard groff's soelim(1) and roff(7) man pages in favor of mandoc's.
That's a shame.  The loss of the latter is a particularly sore point
given all the content it has.

I wonder why mandoc didn't just call its roff(7) page mandoc(7), given
that it parallels groff(7) more than anything else.

Regards,
Branden

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