John Spencer wrote:
[...]
> >> as such i'd love to see the POSIX manpages project actually deliver
> >> portable manpages, instead of assuming that the full-blown GNU userspace
> >> stack is available.
> >
> > Could you give a definition of this portable nroff syntax?
>
> i have a hard time finding detailed specs, but the commands implemented
> by the manviewer are sufficient to display 75% of all manpages on a full
> desktop sabotage linux install with 8000 manpages without a single
> unknown command, despite a lot of packages using their own special
> format. for example anything xorg related uses "XMan", anything
> BSD-related mdoc, and perl manpages use again another set of commands.
>
> so this here seems to represent a very common subset:
> {"\\\"", 0, 0},
> {"nh", 0, 0}, /* This program never inserts hyphens */
> {"hy", 0, 0}, /* This program never inserts hyphens */
> {"PD", 0, 0}, /* Inter-para distance is 1 line */
> {"DT", 0, 0}, /* Default tabs, they can't be non-default! */
> {"IX", 0, 0}, /* Indexing for some weird package */
> {"Id", 0, 0}, /* Line for RCS tokens */
> {"BY", 0, 0},
> {"nf", 0, 1}, /* Line break, Turn line fill off */
> {"fi", 0, 2}, /* Line break, Turn line fill on */
> {"sp", 0, 3}, /* Line break, line space (arg for Nr lines) */
> {"br", 0, 4}, /* Line break */
> {"bp", 0, 5}, /* Page break */
> {"PP", 0, 6},
> {"LP", 0, 6},
> {"P", 0, 6}, /* Paragraph */
> {"RS", 0, 7}, /* New Para + Indent start */
> {"RE", 0, 8}, /* New Para + Indent end */
> {"HP", 0, 9}, /* Begin hanging indent (TP without arg?) */
> {"ad", 0, 10}, /* Line up right margin */
> {"na", 0, 11}, /* Leave right margin unaligned */
> {"ta", 0, 12}, /* Changes _input_ tab spacing, right? */
> {"TH", 1, 1}, /* Title and headers */
> {"SH", 1, 2}, /* Section */
> {"SS", 1, 3}, /* Subsection */
> {"IP", 1, 4}, /* New para, indent except argument 1 */
> {"TP", 1, 5}, /* New para, indent except line 1 */
> {"B", 2, 22}, /* Various font fiddles */
> {"BI", 2, 23},
> {"BR", 2, 21},
> {"I", 2, 33},
> {"IB", 2, 32},
> {"IR", 2, 31},
> {"RB", 2, 12},
> {"RI", 2, 13},
> {"SB", 2, 42},
> {"SM", 2, 44},
> {"C", 2, 22}, /* PH-UX manual pages! */
> {"CI", 2, 23},
> {"CR", 2, 21},
> {"IC", 2, 32},
> {"RC", 2, 12},
> {"so", 3, 0},
Ok, but that seems a bit arbitrary.
How about escape sequences?
> >> the alternative is to apply the tbl preprocessor before shipping the
> >> manpages and instead include the preprocessed output (cleaned up from
> >> groffisms as well)
> >
> > I'm not sure if your man can handle the output of tbl. Attached is the
> > output when run against one of the tables in pax. It looks rather
> > hopeless. Also the fictional script cleaning up the GNU tbl output is
> > likely going to be dependent on a specific tbl version.
> >
> > For eqn it seems much more likely to me that one can produce output
> > which makes your man implementation happy. The equations are already
> > hacked to make them better suitable for nroff.
>
> i agree that the output of tbl is even worse...
For eqn it looks similar. I think I identified the interesting part of
its output, but it still contains a lot of escape sequences. There are
just not that many pages using eqn (i.e. 8) to make me write an eqn
preprocessor with acceptable nroff output.
> btw my research on http://www.troff.org/papers.html revealed that tbl
> and eqn preprocessors existed back in the troff days, so this seems to
> be a historical mistake rather than groff's fault ;)
You might also be interested in
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/index.html
(In order to claim that .T& is classical I checked the original tbl manual.)
> >> as for the other groff specific formatter commands, i am refering to
> >> Felix' response: all of them can either be left away or in case of tbl
> >> and eqn the preprocessed source used instead.
> >
> > .ce remained open. Is there an alternative or could you just implement
> > that?
>
> yes, that can easily be implemented as a nop on my side, without losing
> valuable information.
Good.
Felix
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