Re: Groff UTF-8 support? - Groff documentation section 5.1.9 Input Encodings

[Dave Kemper]

On 3/8/24, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry for the recent extra complication;

Nothing to apologize for: it was easy to figure out, and I understand
the rationale for the change.

> it didn't occur to me that
> people wouldn't just have make(1) generate the real thing.

Well, you've found me out: I'm 99% ignorant of groff's build system.
I periodically build the whole shebang, and don't touch it otherwise.
I know it *can* build smaller parts, but I've never looked into the
various targets.

But more fundamentally, I was approaching the problem from a man-page
mindset, where "see the rendered document" means "render it on the
fly," not "render it to a file then look at that file."  So it didn't
occur to me to look into turning one file into another, a problem that
I may have looked to "make" to solve sooner.


On 3/8/24, ropers <ropers@gmail.com> wrote:
> $ sed s/@VERSION@/VERSION/ groff.texi | makeinfo --plaintext | less
> [less opens and shows this:]
> -:18795: @include: could not find fdl.texi
> (END)
> [edited transcript ends]

Sorry for leading you astray there: as Branden noted in his later
follow-up, I was assuming you were working within a git tree that had
the necessary support files in place.

Branden's advice to do a full git clone will make your life easier in
the long run.  Then you can use "make" as intended to build the manual
in a variety of formats.  One way that's better is that my
cobbled-together solution doesn't scale well as more @KEYWORDS@ are
added to groff.texi.in.

But if you just want to get started as quickly as possible, the only
additional file you need is the fdl.texi reported in your error
message above; I just did an out-of-tree "makeinfo --plaintext" to
verify there weren't other dependencies lurking behind that one.  And
you can do this with either groff.texi or groff.texi.in; the former
doesn't need the "sed" but it also doesn't hurt anything.  You can
pull fdl.texi from
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/plain/doc/fdl.texi -- it
rarely changes in git, so there's little worry of it growing stale.
(The groff.texi you've pulled from the web site, however, grows staler
every day -- it undergoes frequent git updates, including a few you've
prompted.)

At least installing texinfo on your system wasn't wasted effort:
you'll still need this no matter which of those two routes you take.