Aw: Re: mandoc shortcomings

[Carsten Kunze <carsten.kunze%arcor.de@localhost>]

Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost> wrote:

> It certainly does not need to be groff however...   I do notice
> though that mdoc uses (and documents) groffisms (\*[xx] stuff, and there's
> at least one macro defined with a 3 letter name) which would make
> replacing groff with a more standard troff (heirloom troff or some other)
> more of a challenge.   Getting rid of all signs of groffisms from
> everywhere would be an excellent idea.

Heirloom roff does support \*[xx] and 3 letter names.
I am aware that Heirloom doesn't format groff's man pages correctly.
Intentionally I didn't fix this, since up to now I had the opinion that a
man page should use mdoc or man macros and no low level requests.
But it should not be a problem to make the groff man pages work with
Heirloom.

(For me mandoc is ok and for the groff man pages I use something like

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
tbl /usr/local/share/man/man1/groff.1 | nroff -mandoc | less

so I have no problem with NetBSD like it is.  Of course I do not use
groff from the base.  I use git, but using pkgin or pkgsrc to get version
1.22.3 would also be easy.)

Carsten