Re: Generation process for cpp.1

[Russ Allbery <rra at stanford dot edu>]

Zack Weinberg <zackw@Stanford.EDU> writes:

> Yes.  This is still a problem with podlators-1.04.

> .Sh "Brief description of \f(CW\*(C`gcov\*(C'\fR data files"

> I think the final \fR should be \fP.

\fB, you mean?  Ugh... this is a real mess.  That puts pod2man in the
situation of having to know what font the underlying macros are using for
a minor section header, and it could legitimately differ between different
man implementations.

Bleh.

This isn't the first time that I've realized that *roff made a really bad
mistake by not having a stack of font changes that could be popped off,
only an escape to set the font to something in particular.

> I've also noticed a problem with mysterious blank lines in the output.

[...]

> when nroffed.  I *think* this is actually a page break.

I'm pretty sure it is, yeah.

> There is also a lengthy block of blank lines at the end of the nroffed
> manpage.  I don't know where they come from, but they only show up in
> pod2man-generated manpages, and not all of them either...

Hm.  I don't know why it would only show up in pod2man man pages.  I tend
to see that all the time with all man pages when using a pager without the
-s option (which man normally adds to the pager invocation to squeeze out
blank lines) as *roff tries to fill out the last "page" with blank lines.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>