Re: Generation process for cpp.1

[Russ Allbery <rra at stanford dot edu>]

Zack Weinberg <zackw@Stanford.EDU> writes:
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 09:24:27AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> 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.

> Um, no, I meant \fP, which switches to the previous font.  This only
> works if there's been exactly one font change, if you do a second one
> you're hosed.

Oh... I didn't know you could do that.  Do you know how widespread support
for that is?  It's not in the troff paper, which is what I normally use as
a reference manual for figuring out what I can do (I don't trust groff to
mark things that are GNU extensions).  That *might* give me enough
leverage to solve the common case, although it couldn't handle a more
complicated case of markup in headings.  I think I can see how to use this
in the font mapping code, though.  Maybe.

> Well, it *does* actually, it's just only one change deep.  But no
> argument from me here... and it's not just fonts, either.

*roff is a really nasty markup language in a bunch of ways.  I still like
it a bit better than HTML, but it's close (and from me, that's a pretty
negative opinion; I utterly detest HTML).

> I didn't know about -s, but I tested this with 'nroff -man
> /usr/man/man1/whatever.1 | less' so that's not a concern.  I only see
> the blank lines with pod2man-generated pages.  Also, for some reason I
> don't get a page footer except with pod2man-generated pages.  It's
> probably a bug in my tmac.an.

pod2man generates a full .TH line.  Maybe that's the difference?  I've
seen a lot of vendor man pages that only give .TH the first two (required)
arguments of page title and section and leave off the additional
parameters.

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