Re: [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Gunnar Ritter]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> wrote:

> I want to drastically simplify the markup used in several pieces of
> groff documentation, eliminating a lot of the hairy custom macros they
> presently use.
>
> groffer.1
> groff_out.5
> groff_tmac.5
> groff.7.gz
> groff_char.7
> groff_mdoc.7
> groff_trace.7
>
> Technically this won't be hard; I could make the required changes in a few 
> hours.  But I hear you asking "Why fix what ain't broken?". 

I would claim it is. The groff manual pages also cannot be
displayed properly by other manual page viewers. There are
some glitches even with Heirloom troff; although it can handle
the language, some groff-specific macros do not exist in its
-man implementation.

So I think this is worth fixing regardless of the specific
case of DocBook conversion. groff is by far not the only
program which is used to display the groff manual pages.

        Gunnar