Re: mksh manpage

[Thorsten Glaser <tg%mirbsd.de@localhost>]

Moritz Wilhelmy dixit:

>> The existence of a line consisting only of two dots is usually
>> a good indicator for the presence of custom macros. A line
>> consisting only of a dot, a backslash and a closing curly brace
>> (b
>Interesting. Would be nice to have it fall back to something
>sensible in this case.

Indeed. Maybe there could be a grep or, in the case of compressed
manpages (which weren’t used by default on BSDs last time I looked)
some kind of buffering…

Well, the following POSIX BREs show evidence of it being a roff
document, not an mdocml compatible manpage:

^\.\.$
^\.\\}$
^\.[     ]*de[   ]
^\.i[ef][        ]

>> (While here, could TNF please use \*(Gt instead of \*[Gt] so
>> their manpages are nroff compatible, since two-character named
>> references can be written either way?)
>
>As someone who doesn't really know much about roff, how do they
>differ?

\*[foo] is a GNU groff extension to have arbitrarily-long named
strings, whereas \*X and \*(XY are the standard nroff/troff/ditroff
string named references (string, macro, register, etc. names are
either one or two characters in classic roff).

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
Sometimes they [people] care too much: pretty printers [and syntax highligh-
ting, d.A.] mechanically produce pretty output that accentuates irrelevant
detail in the program, which is as sensible as putting all the prepositions
in English text in bold font.   -- Rob Pike in "Notes on Programming in C"