Re: mandoc shortcomings

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Thu, 17 Dec 2015 18:03:14 +0100
    From:        Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20151217170314.GB9362%britannica.bec.de@localhost>

  | That [having mandoc call troff] doesn't really work,

This is in no way supported by your reason - if you had said "isn't needed"
that would have been, though I disagree...

  | since there is a lot of roff markup used which
  | simply has no relevance to terminal output (or any at all).

Not everything is a terminal... if there were ever to be a NetBSD book
for example, it would be nice to be able to include selected NetBSD man
pages, without touching their source, at all.  That means they would need
(and should have for other reasons) the correct markup, whether useful
for terminal output or not.

Of course, there can be useless markup in anything, just as there can
be useless code in anything ... that's all just bugs and should be fixed
when discovered, but isn't relevant here.

And while it looks like (or perhaps it is just how I have it configured)
the NetBSD xman command just parses and makes better looking (slightly) output
from the nroff'd version of the man pages, I'm sure sometime in the past
I saw a version that actually used var width fonts, etc (Times or something
rather than Courier), and hence troff.


From a later message:

  | I'd strongly prefer to depend on the support for more than
  | 10 macro arguments

Agreed - of all the changes that have been made, that is the one truly
worth keeping.

kre