Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > You've forgotten to store something in register `a'.
>
> On reflection, I think that should probably be ".ad b".  It's
> supposed to be restoring the normal adjustment mode for a man page.

I disagree.  Perhaps someone likes to make the appearance of man pages
formatted with -man similar to the ones formatted with -mdoc, this is,
using ragged-right.

> If you take that header, tinker it as you like, and put it in the tmac
> directory of the CVS repo and tell me what the name is, I'll just "cvs
> up" and start including it with .mso rather than dropping a copy in
> each file I simplify.  I'd do the add myself but I don't have write
> access yet.

Hmm.  I would rather like to have the .mso directly in `an-old.tmac'.
I think I'll call the extension file `an-ext.tmac'.

> You might want to add the TQ (TP continuation macro) that's used in
> a lot of these files.

Yes.

> 3. Also rip out inclusions of the www and ttychar macro files.
>    The code in those is totally nonportable.

Hmm.  tty-char.tmac has been there since the very beginning.  I've
only updated the file to use groff syntax.

Instead of omitting I ask you to use the following code:

  .if n \
  .  if \n(.g \
  .    do mso tty-char.tmac

> 6. Run doclifter to make sure it lifts clean.  This is also
>    a portability check.  And if I ever run into a file that
>    actually *needs* the www and ttychar inclusions, doclifter
>    will complain about undefined requests/glyphs.

doclifter will never complain since tty-char only defines glyphs which
your lift baby already knows.

> I just fixed up ditroff.man.  This is going fairly smoothly so far.
> Your past macro coders have had bad cases of "ooh! nifty feature!
> must use!",

:-)

> but despite that the code is pretty readable.

It's not really clear to me what you mean with `macro coders'.


    Werner