Re: [Groff] Avoiding the pod2man mistake

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > BTW, I see a major obstacle to extend man as you suggest: groff
> > isn't always installed with its latest version.  I can imagine to
> > add an update to the 1.18 series which comes with the man
> > extensions, but many, many platforms won't have this.  So maybe
> > the current way is to really advise people to add this stuff to
> > the man page's preamble.
>
> In spite of the fact that it's in the latest version of the man
> package?

Hmm.  What do you mean with `man package'?  AFAIK, it's the job of the
man formatter (this is, groff) to provide the macros to format a man
page.  I'm not aware of any other, non-roff package which contains an
equivalent to `an-old.tmac' (which is loaded by `andoc.tmac').


    Werner


PS: I just had a look into Plan 9's tmac.an

      http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/tmac/tmac.an

    There you have a macro `.L' (together with its siblings `.LR' and
    `.RL') which give access to a monospaced font -- this is missing
    in the 7thEdMan from Bell-Labs:

      http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/tmac.an

    It also defines a `.HR' command for URLs -- and it defines both
    `.EX' and `.EE'!  Other macros defined for Plan 9 don't look
    interesting enought to be supported...