Re: [Groff] Third-party viewers, KDE, and the "portable set"

[Gunnar Ritter]

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

> Gunnar, you could help by reporting which requests Heirloom Troff

Heirloom troff supports almost all groff requests; a complete
list is in <http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools/troff.pdf>.
The exceptions are mainly in areas which are irrelevant in the
context of manual pages, like debugging or color support. The
only unsupported request which sometimes occurs in manual pages
is .fam. I do not support font families because there is no
consistent naming scheme with Type 1, OpenType, and TrueType
fonts which Heirloom troff accesses directly, and because the
whole concept is too simplistic for high-quality fonts with
small capitals, old-style numerals, and different shapes for
different sizes anyway.

Heirloom troff supports all groff escape sequences except for
\O, at least to the extent of discarding them (e.g. \F). It
also supports all groff expressions except for the f unit
specifier and the .if m color test.

The Heirloom -mg groff compatibility macros add definitions
for all groff special characters using the .char request, but
only for troff. nroff currently supports only the traditional
special characters and does not allow to define custom ones;
I might change that if there is a good reason to do so.

All this is in relation to groff 1.18; I consider to add some
features of the 1.19 series later.

> and the KDE man-page viewer support.

At its core, it seems to be a derivative of the man2html
program by Richard Verhoeven which is also part of Andries
Brouwer's man package:
<http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/kioslave/man/man2html.cpp?rev=416894&view=auto>

>From your list of safe requests, it lacks support for .bp,
.cu, .do, .em, .pm, .rr, and .ul. It implements all escape
sequences you consider as safe, and has a large list of
supported special characters which I am too lazy to examine
in detail.

As I wrote before, the manServer script by Rolf Howarth lacks
support for .bp, .ul, .cu, .tm, .as, .em, .am, .rr, .pm, .cc,
.c2, .ab, and .do, so I think these also do not belong on the
list of safe requests. It lacks reasonable support for the \c
and \<CR> escape sequences.

        Gunnar