Right now the second argument to `MR` is mandatory (did I forget to put
in a style warning?--no, I didn't). If I were to loosen the syntax to
permit an empty second argument, I would have the macro _not_ supply any
parentheses, and if you wanted abutting punctuation, I would require the
man(7) writer to put `\c` at the end of the first argument. So the new
`MR` synopsis would be as follows.
.MR page-title [page-section [trailing-punct]]
Thus if you wanted to talk in a section 2 or 3 page about some C
function name that has a man page to which you'd already referred, you
would write, for example.
The
.MR gmtime\c
() function converts the calendar time
.I timep
to broken-down time representation,
Right. I don't see any solutions for this apart from making `MR` more
permissive, supporting "semantic tag classes" (my pie-in-the-sky idea
above), or bloating the macro name space for a something of limited and
specialized function, and the last is my least favorite by a long shot.
If someone else has a better imagination, please speak up.
At intervals over the past few days I've been drafting an email in my
head about my further man(7) reforms; there are three. One is above.
The other two involve the lack of a macro for quotation and the lack of
a non-deprecated, non-tbl(1) way to eliminate the space between
paragraphs in lists.