[Groff] Re: Simplifying groff documentation

[Gunnar Ritter]

[Sorry - for whatever reason I did not receive some replies to
my messages, so this is text quoted from the list archive]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> While I agree with Gunnar's argument in general, I wouldn't go as far
> as avoiding .de.  My doclifter is perfectly happy eating macro definitions
> and expanding them, and the logic for this is simple enough that I think
> we can reasonably expect other viewers to do likewise.

You are probably right; it has been a while since I had a closer
look at man page converters, so I may remember wrong.

> .br .nl .sp .bp .ft .fi .nf .ul .cu .tm .so .ds .as .rm
> .rn .em .am .nr .rr .ig .pm .cc .c2 .ab .do 
>
> This is not all the requests doclifter interprets.  I also handle
> .nop .return .mso .als .shift .fam, but recommend against putting
> these in the safe set because heirloom troff and other viewers 
> probably won't get them right.

The "Heirloom troff" I refered to is not plain AT&T troff but my
extended variant, <http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html>.
>From this list it supports anything except .fam.

On the other hand, the script which I use to convert the manual
pages for my web pages, manServer by Rolf Howarth,
<http://www.squarebox.co.uk/users/rolf/download/manServer.shtml>,
supports none of the groff extensions, and also does not support
.nl, .bp, .ul, .cu, .tm, .as, .em, .am, .rr, .pm, .cc, .c2, .ab,
and .do from the list of two-character requests. (It generally
does its job quite good, though.) Certainly, a look at a single
script cannot define a set of reasonable requests in manual pages.

        Gunnar