On 15 Jun 2002 16:55:21 -0400, "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
wrote:
> "James K. Lowden" <jklowden@schemamania.org> writes:
> > I'm using txt2man, and it's producing some not-quite-right output.  I
> > want to tweak it, but I can't seem to find the nroff (?) macros that
> > man pages use.  
> 
> It appears that the tool you are using (txt2man) produces old-style
> man macro formatted sources as output.
> 
> There is no documentation in NetBSD itself for the man macros, but I
> happen to have the following man page around from the CSRG Final
> source tree. Just cut it out and run it through "nroff -man" to format
> it.
[snip]

Perry, 

Despite your kind help, I'm still hosed, as far as I can tell.  The
txt2man DESC should say, "Broken.  Use something better."

Problem is, unless I'm blind, is that I've got mdoc(7) and man(7), but
precious little on troff, whose page says, "Only the features not in Unix
troff are described here", and of course /usr/share/doc/usd/21.troff/ is
empty.  I also didn't find any troff docs at the Unix Historical Society. 


My so-called tool emits (what I assume is) straight troff input in
addition to man macros:

	.SH SYNOPSIS
	.nf
	.fam C

	\fBfreebcp\fP ...

But I can't adjust its output because I'm not a native troff speaker, nor
a troff book buyer.  

I got on this road because someone sent me a pseudo-man page in plain
text, and txt2man seemed just the ticket, rather than marking it up
myself.  And it almost was.  

Regards,

--jkl