Re: pkg/48640: Many lang/tcl man pages fail to render correctly

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze%usta.de@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR pkg/48640; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Ingo Schwarze <schwarze%usta.de@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Cc: Havard Eidnes <he%netbsd.org@localhost>, Thomas Klausner 
<wiz%netbsd.org@localhost>,
        Kai-Uwe Eckhardt <kuehro%gmx.de@localhost>
Subject: Re: pkg/48640: Many lang/tcl man pages fail to render correctly
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2014 22:35:05 +0100

 Hi Havard and Thomas,
 
 thanks for reporting this issue with Tcl_NewStringObj(3).
 That page is using many low-level roff(7) requests and escapes,
 so it is challenging for mandoc(1).  Some roff features used
 by the page are simply not implemented in mandoc because they
 don't usually occur in man pages.
 
 Anyway, i have implemented a few new features and fixed several
 bugs to let this page render better:
 
  * In the roff parser, implement string comparison conditionals
    for the .if and .ie requests.
  * In the roff parser, support negation of non-numeric conditionals
    for the .if and .ie requests.
  * In the roff parser, fix six bugs related to the closing
    of conditional blocks on macro lines.
  * In the man(7) formatter, fix three bugs related to same-line
    detection in .TP head arguments and in .nf text content.
 
 I have committed the following nine patches to the upstream
 mandoc CVS repo:
 
 http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/cvsweb/roff.c?cvsroot=mdocml     1.195-198
 http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/cvsweb/roff.7?cvsroot=mdocml     1.48
 http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/cvsweb/man_term.c?cvsroot=mdocml 1.141-142
 http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/cvsweb/man_html.c?cvsroot=mdocml 1.91
 http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/cvsweb/tree.c?cvsroot=mdocml     1.51
 
 With these patches, mandoc no longer loses part of the content, but
 displays everything in a very readable form.  The output from mandoc
 still differs from groff output because the page uses some more
 features that mandoc doesn't implement (arithmetic calculations in
 assignments to number registers, width measurements, and redefinitions
 of tabulator positions).  Incidentally, the mandoc output even looks
 better now than the groff output, even though the groff output
 follows more closely what the formatting instructions say.  Part
 of the groff output is crowded very uglily into a narrow column on
 the far right of the terminal, which is not likely to be what the
 author intended; there must be some oversight in the macros doing
 the width calculations on the author's part, at least regarding the
 terminal output case.
 
 Feel free to contact me directly or via <discuss%mdocml.bsd.lv@localhost>
 for any feedback or questions, or if you would like to see a
 public mandoc-1.12.4 release including these patches such that
 you can more easily update your system.
 
 Yours,
   Ingo