Re: Using 'groff'

[Todd Gruhn <tgruhn2%gmail.com@localhost>]

Thanks -- I learned something.

My goal is to call ( *roff ) , and then catch , and display the man-page
in perlman.

I want this because of the probs I have with mwm.1  .
I currently use 'rman' (also in pkgsrc)

On Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 10:41 PM Robert Elz <kre%munnari.oz.au@localhost> wrote:
>
>     Date:        Sat, 17 Jun 2023 15:18:35 +0000
>     From:        Todd Gruhn <tgruhn2%gmail.com@localhost>
>     Message-ID:  <CA+9Akf-fV_ig-YCt-0BvAjTU2MycHJVyAqomDmE6N=jjb=8TBg%mail.gmail.com@localhost>
>
>   | This works:
>   |     groff -man /usr/pkg/man/man1/man.1  -Tascii 2> /dev/null  |   more
>
> I'm surprised, I would have expected it to need to be
>
>         groff -man -Tascii /usr/pkg/man/man1/man.1 ...
>
> though with GNU tools one can never tell what they might allow.
> (the order of the -m and -T options isn't important).
>
>   | OR ,  does 'groff -man ...' always need to have a full dir-name
>   | (/usr/pkg/man/man1/* )?
>
> It needs to be given a path to the file(s) it is to format, yes.
> groff is not a manual page reader, it is a document formatter.
> It works for man pages because man pages are documents, but groff
> itself has no idea that what is being formatted is a manual page,
> nor where such things might be stored.
>
> Note that "-man" is not an option - -m is the option, it says
> which macro package to use, "an" is the name of the manual macros,
> used that way, as in practice, no-one ever does "-m an" (though you
> could) with the -m arg to *roff - the macro package name is (by convention)
> always given with the -m (as above, as -man in this case, there are a whole
> bunch of other possibilities, for documents written for those macros,
> you have to use the right macros for the document, and usually the 'm'
> is considered part of the macro set name (the manuscript macros ('s')
> are -ms, memorandum macros ('m') -mm, Eric's macros ('e') -me, the
> manual macros ('an') -man, the doc (new form macros) 'doc' (-mdoc),
> and the man/mdoc work it out and use either -man -or -mdoc, macros
> ("andoc") are -mandoc).
>
> I would also suggest not redirecting stderr to /dev/null - if anything
> is being printed to stderr, you (or someone) probably wants to investigate,
> as it usually indicates some kind of error.
>
> kre
>