Re: [Groff] The case against the case against .EX/.EE & .DS/.DE

[Gunnar Ritter]

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

> 3. These macros are already present in at least some legacy Unixes.
> Notably, .EX/.EE is in Ultrix/OSF-1.

Yes, and I see it is actually used in many Tru64 manual
pages; since I want to be able to display such system pages
with Heirloom nroff, I should have code for it anyway.

> I'm not sure where .DS/.DE
> came from, but considering the relatively large number of uses without
> local definition I'm sure it must be historical somewhere.

Can you say in which pages you discovered them? I find much
fewer examples for .DS, without a characteristic pattern.

An examination of the CSRG archives shows that .Ds had been
defined in -mdoc as a "filled block display" in 4.3BSD-Reno,
but was deleted with 4.4BSD.

Which DocBook tag should correspond to .DS?

> I wish to note that there is no other man extension that I
> would push in this way.

That is reassuring.

        Gunnar