process man(7) (or any other package of macros) without typesetting

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Branden,

I've had this desire for a long time, and maybe now I have a strong
reason to ask for it.

In the usual groff pipeline, you have something like

        $ preconv            foo.1     >foo.1.tbl
        $ tbl               <foo.1.tbl >foo.1.eqn
        $ eqn -Tutf8        <foo.1.eqn >foo.1.man
        $ troff -Tutf8 -man <foo.1.man >foo.1.set
        $ grotty -c         <foo.1.set >foo.1.cat

The problem is that at no point you can have the .roff source, after
the man(7) macros have been expanded.  Would it be possible to split
the groff(1) pipeline to have one more preprocessor, let's call it
woman(1) (because man(1) is already taken), so that it translates
man(7) to roff(7)?  I'd like to be able to do this:

        $ preconv            foo.1p      >foo.1p.tbl
        $ tbl               <foo.1p.tbl  >foo.1p.eqn
        $ eqn -Tutf8        <foo.1p.eqn  >foo.1p.man
        $ woman -Tutf8      <foo.1p.man  >foo.1p.roff
        $ troff -Tutf8      <foo.1p.roff >foo.1p.set
        $ grotty -c         <foo.1p.set  >foo.1p.cat

With man(7) alone, it's already interesting to have this for
debugging purposes.  But I envision a more useful thing: POSIX uses
mm(7) for their manual pages.  Ideally, I'd like to keep their
sources with minimal modification in man-pages-posix.  But of course,
man(1) only understands man(7) and mdoc(7).  If we add a mm(1)
program that is the mm(7) equivalent of woman(1), then I'd be able
to install a preprocessed page, with the following pipeline, and
man(1) should be able to render it, I guess:

        $ preconv            foo.1p     >foo.1p.tbl
        $ tbl               <foo.1p.tbl >foo.1p.eqn
        $ eqn -Tutf8        <foo.1p.eqn >foo.1p.man
        $ mm -Tutf8         <foo.1p.man >foo.1p.roff
        $ install            foo.1p.roff /usr/man/man1p/foo.1p

Does it sound reasonable to you?

Cheers,
Alex


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