Re: why page-local macro definitions come after `TH` call in man(7)

[Thomas Dickey]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2024 at 03:48:24PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> I saw the following recent commit to the X11 Athena widget set.[1]
> 
> commit 080e6e49825c2e03adb0c5dd8dad53767ec41ce6
> Author:     Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
> AuthorDate: Thu Feb 29 18:12:40 2024 -0500
> Commit:     Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@his.com>
> CommitDate: Sat Mar 2 16:40:07 2024 +0000
> 
>     manpage: assume .EX/.EE macros
> 
>     Branden Robinson says macros have to go after ".TH"; the existing macros 
> did
>     not match the format used in groff, etc., and can be simply removed.  The
>     ".TQ" macro is used only without a parameter, causing an extra space to be
>     emitted (and fixed that by dropping the parameter).
> 
>     Signed-off-by: Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
> 
> Being cited as an authority stimulated in me not just a desire to pull a
> James "Kibo" Parry impression but also to further clarify this topic in
> the groff_man(7) document.
> 
> The reason for this placement is the widespread usage of the "mandoc"
> wrapper, which isn't a mere GNUism as one might suspect, but dates all
> the way back to 4.3BSD-Reno (1990).

iirc, that's what you reported on bug-ncurses, but adding the url in the
commit-message seemed a lot more work than just citing who reported the
detail that I had in mind.

if my script had warned about that, I may have been more terse :-)

(at the moment, my script doesn't flag that detail for warnings, but does
tell me if the macro is defined differently - and on moving the macros
past .TH, the result was not so good)

anyway, I was in libXaw to repair the issue reported here:

https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive-source/pull/64

(better late than never, and with the push to "Modern C", I expect that
change will be generally-available sooner than later)

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
https://invisible-island.net

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