Re: Summary of man-page formatting

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 10:39:08 +0100, Anders Magnusson wrote:

> Den 2021-03-13 kl. 10:03, skrev Valery Ushakov:
> > On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 10:54:46 +0100, Reinoud Zandijk wrote:
> > 
> > > Well, there is lout to consider.
> > [...]
> > > I've never used it for manpage rendering though! A simple `awk'
> > > script could indeed do it as its format is quite easy. Uwe has
> > > experience with it :)
> > Right, and in my experience it would be completely unsuitable. :)
> > 
> > Now, don't get me wrong, I love Lout and and when I need a batch
> > formatter it's what I use unless there are strong overriding reasons.
> > But it's *way* slower than roff or tex (remember, that troff and tex
> > are macro processors, while lout uses a functional language).
>
> Hm, I have a vague memory of that this discussion a very long time
> ago started with the problem that manpages that contained raw troff
> code couldn't be formatted correctly with mandoc(1)?
> 
> In case anyone cares; some time ago I fixed the original nroff in
> 2.11BSD so that it could handle the mandoc macros.  With todays
> standard this code is very small and might solve the original
> problem directly.

heirloom doctools (the original ditroff as reached us by the way of
solaris) is reasonably fast (not as fast as mandoc, but non-trivially
faster than groff) and is quite feature rich, so if we want to 1) have
some troff in base 2) that is not groff, then I think it's the only
reasonable choice.

-uwe