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Re: Summary of man-page formatting



Den 2021-03-13 kl. 16:06, skrev Valery Ushakov:
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.
Agreed if the goal is to replace groff.
What i was referring to was only the ability to format nroff man pages containing troff directives, nothing else.  It's really small for that usage.
The troff part only generates output for the C/A/T 4 typesetter :-)

-- R


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