rendering man pages with a customized an-old.tmac (was: Release Candidate 1.23.0.rc1)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Hans,

At 2022-04-27T12:49:18+0200, Hans Unzner wrote:
> Ok I try to restate my question.
> As far as I know, an-old.tmac is used when converting a man page to
> HTML with a command like this
> groff -Thtml -man a_man_page.9 > a_man_page.html

Yes.  More generally, groff uses an-old.tmac[1] to format a man page for
_any_ output device, not just HTML, when the page uses the man(7)
macros.

> But now I want to use a modified version of an-old.tmac without
> replacing it in the /usr/share/groff/ directory.  Is it possible to do
> that? I always get a blank output when passing the modified macro with
> the -m option.

Yes.  Simply override the macro file search path with the
GROFF_TMAC_PATH environment variable or -M option to [gnt]roff.

$ zcat /usr/share/man/man1/neqn.1.gz | groff -man -Tascii
NEQN(1)                     General Commands Manual                    NEQN(1)



NAME
       neqn - format equations for ASCII output

SYNOPSIS
       neqn [eqn-options]

DESCRIPTION
       neqn invokes the eqn(1) command with the ascii output device.

       Note  that eqn does not support low-resolution, typewriter-like devices
       (although it may work adequately for very simple input).

SEE ALSO
       eqn(1)



groff 1.22.4                    27 January 2021                        NEQN(1)
$ sed '1i\
.tm GBR was here
' /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/an-old.tmac > $HOME/an-old.tmac
$ zcat /usr/share/man/man1/neqn.1.gz | groff -M . -man -Tascii
GBR was here
NEQN(1)                     General Commands Manual                    NEQN(1)



NAME
       neqn - format equations for ASCII output

SYNOPSIS
       neqn [eqn-options]

DESCRIPTION
       neqn invokes the eqn(1) command with the ascii output device.

       Note  that eqn does not support low-resolution, typewriter-like devices
       (although it may work adequately for very simple input).

SEE ALSO
       eqn(1)



groff 1.22.4                    27 January 2021                        NEQN(1)

Does this help?

Regards,
Branden

[1] to be renamed simply "an.tmac" in groff 1.23.0

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