Re: groff injects blank page

[Carlos]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 03:00:34PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2023-04-22T12:36:51-0400, Carlos wrote:
> > How am I supposed to give you an example? 
> 
> For a guy who likes manually constructing pipelines, Ralph seems
> inordinately disinterested in the intermediate stages when
> troubleshooting.  ;-)
> 
> Unfortunately the PostScript output you've been sharing is not terribly
> helpful; please hold off for now.  Your "nroff -man | cat -n" output is
> the most telling clue we have so far, in my opinion.

Sure. But no one's sure of the cause of the blank page.

If you had to guess, what would it be? 


> 
> > gdb nroff?
> 
> Not likely--that's a shell script!
> 
> > I can confirm that -mandoc or -man for that matter on Alpine Linux
> > along with groff 1.22 shoves the blank page right in the beginning
> 
> It might be worth comparing the /etc/groff/man.local files in both your
> main distribution (which you haven't identified) and Alpine Linux.
> 

I'll check.

If on the other hand, I were to compare the stats from groff and
the other spare machine where no blank page is injected, then it'd
alnost be like cheating the way out to find the cause, which is not
fair either for a blank page. Just joking. But I'll check. 

It's interesting nonetheless.

> > If in doubt, set up a project, take your time, no one's rushing you,
> > and install Alpine stable and see for yourself :)
> 
> I hear their diff command is a little anemic...
> 
> > The only version that works without an extra blank page, not extra
> > really, since it shoves it up in the beginning, is
> > 
> > GNU groff version 1.23.0.rc4.19-96b92 so far
> 
> The groff_man(7) man page will tell you exactly where the man.local file
> is installed.  View the man page and scroll down to the "Files" section.

Did you mean groff man(7) or roff or man(7) man. Sorry but I couldn't
find the section or subsection titled Files

thanks Branden.
> 
> > which its compilation finally went through after installing netpbm
> > 
> > But I'm not very keen on the latter,
> 
> I've never met anyone who had a grievance with netpbm before.  But it
> shouldn't matter; if you don't care to use groff's HTML output support,
> you don't need netpbm, and the build should not fail without it--but it
> _will_ warn you (upon configuration) that HTML support will be absent.
> 
> [partial build log snipped]
> 
> I saw nothing remarkable or erroneous in that build log.
> 
> Regards,
> Branden



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