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

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > I tend to advocate the use of .DS/.DE, .TQ, .EX/.EE, .SY, .OP, and
> > probably other nifty things to be used within man pages,
> > *together* with its macro definitions in the preamble.  This gives
> > us both a decent markup and backwards compatibility.
> 
> This is certainly an acceptable path, provided that the new macros
> are offered in a public domain implementation so that everybody can
> use them without worrying about the license.

Of course.

> Still, if you want macros for the synopsis, there is something
> missing yet.  Code like
> 
> | .OP \-W name
> | .RI "[\ " files\|.\|.\|. "\ ]"
> 
> mixes structural and visual markup in a questionable way (the
> second line makes assumptions about how the output of .OP looks).

I'm open to any suggestions for a sensible macro.

> POSIX (available for free from <http://www.unix.org>) has a set of
> prescriptions for synopsis formatting within the standard (Base
> Definitions, 12.1 "Utility Argument Syntax"). It clearly has its
> origins in manual page synopsis practice, so looking at it might be
> helpful for defining synopsis macros.

Thanks for the pointer.  Here a direct URL:

  http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap12.html

However, those rules are not really helpful IMHO in our discussion how
such macros should look like.


    Werner