Re: mwm(1) is a mess UGHGH!

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Wed, 14 Jun 2023 19:06:52 +0100
    From:        Chavdar Ivanov <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <CAG0OUxhfkM40ZnZi=F1KW1=ZUmBfOYwjnb_709Vp_03XwLxqPw%mail.gmail.com@localhost>

  | > tbl /usr/pkg/man/man1/mwm.1 | groff -Tascii -mandoc | less
  |
  | This works.

I haven't looked at the manual page in question, but there was nothing
in the part quoted which suggested that tbl was required.

\! is a transparent copy - the line which follows is copied to wherever
it is going (often into a macro, keep, or string - it can just be to the
output, but \& would more usually be used for that - they both generate
no output, however the \! is not included in the text copied, where \&
would be, so \& protects lines with leading . or ' chars, no matter how
many times they are processed, they never become macro calls, \! doesn't).

The effect is that the macro call which follows is not interpreted now,
when the line is first being read, but later, when the string/macro/keep
is re-read into the text.

Your average "fake" man page processing tool is unlikely to cope with
that level of *roff minutiae, so anything written with that level of
detail (or which has already been processed by one of the pre-processors,
like tbl or eqn) and has generated something like that, is almost always
going to need a full *roff implementation to handle correctly.

kre