Hi Gunnar, > To avoid misunderstandings, I repeat that the situation is completely > different for other troff-related aspects. We certainly do not need to > care whether arbitrary documents compile with AIX troff. But nroff > -man is a special case.
I think that's a good point as someone who has tried to write a portable man page in the past. At the time perl(1) was a single, highly readable, man page. Good enough to learn Perl from. And the man page source stuck to portable -man macros and had definitions at the top for extras it felt were useful but non-standard. It seems modern-day perl(1) still does that to an extent, e.g. .Vb and .Ve for verbatim text and lots of strings for accents, etc. Perhaps groff's guide to writing a man page should stick to `standard' macros in -man and provide a suitably licensed header for non-standard ones the author can embed in their man page. Ends up with multiple copies of course but my man/man1 directory already has 357 definitions of .Vb, not necessarily all the same. Probably Perl's POD has caused this. Cheers, Ralph. _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
