> Having grappled with troff markup weirdness on 13,000 pages, and
> written an interpreter for a a substantial part of troff within
> doclifter, one of the things I am well equipped by experience to do
> is describe a "safe troff" subset that we should recommend man-page
> writers adhere to.
Very interesting.
> I think it might not be a bad idea for troff to throw warnings when
> a man page uses a troff request outside the safe set. Note that I
> am *not* recommending this measure for troff documents other than
> man pages.
Hmm. This is doable by redefining the requests, but it means an
update to the man macros each time I add something new.
> Here is the safe set:
>
> .br .nl .sp .bp .ft .fi .nf .ul .cu .tm .so .ds .as .rm
> .rn .em .am .nr .rr .ig .pm .cc .c2 .ab .do
Thanks. However, you haven't told us which escapes are `safe'.
> The really big evil issue is .if/.ie/.el; I handle many cases of
> these correctly, but the logic to get evaluation of conditionals
> right is so complex and the edge cases so nasty that these cannot in
> general be in the safe set.
Well, conditionals can't be avoided (see my other mail), I think, so I
wonder whether you can go into details which evaluation cases cause
problems.
Werner
_______________________________________________
Groff mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
