RE: man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Jeff Conrad]

> Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2020 8:01 AM
> 
> It's non-portable because that other person might use a man(7) formatter
> that doesn't support .am or .pdfbookmark, or not in the same way as groff.

> > What's far more nonstandard ...

> Yes, that is very evil.  Never try to be clever in manual page source
> code.  Strictly stick to what man(7) documents.
> 
> Individual manual pages are not the place to develop new formatting
> features.

I neglected to mention that the page is for a very specialized command
and is unlikely to exist in other than PDF format except on my system.
Everyone using it so far is running Windows, so no one is likely to say
"man <program>".  It's in man(7) format mainly as a convenience.  It's
obvious, perhaps, that it should not be distributed for installation in
a normal man directory (unless perhaps already formatted).

Perhaps man(7) format wasn't the best choice, but it was a quick (and
perhaps dirty) way to provided some documentation that might not
otherwise have been provided.  A couple of people mentioned the lack of
bookmarks, which does seem pretty lame for 2020.  Perhaps a better
alternative would be to rewrite the page in texinfo to avoid confusion,
though in this context, I'm not sure the effort is justified.  And I
suppose someone might complain that there's no info, which I don't have
and cannot test.

Many of my man pages include extensions like those in an-ext.tmac; some
have the same names but behave differently.  Some of these go back 30
years when an-ext.tmac didn't exist, so I really didn't have a choice.
Perhaps that's now not good, but I don't have a great urge to go back
and update everything.  In most cases, this works to no great evil
because most of the commands are only for my use.  But I guess I should
be careful to provide formatted versions the few times I send them to
others.

Anyway, thanks for the observation, which I might have not thought of
(one person did ask about a Linux port).  Using the MKS environment, I
sometimes forget that most *nix environments have diverged considerably
from mine in the last 15 years (the MKS man command doesn't appear to
format anything, expecting formatted files to reside in */cat? directories
as on most Unix systems long ago).

Jeff