Hi Andre, > I'd like to include a simple diagram in a man page, something like > this : > > _____ _____ _____ > | | A | | C | | > | X |---->| Y |----->| Z | > | |<----| |<-----| | > |_____| B |_____| D |_____| > > I suppose I could use tbl or switch to a fixed-spacing font and use > .nf. What would you recommend ?
IIRC, some of the Sun OS man pages from the 80s used to have the odd diagram. It may be worth a grep through collections of man pages to see if you can find some that use tbl, or pic, etc., and see how they handle the different output formats. I suspect the best result, especially if it doesn't create too much duplication, would be to use `.if t' and `.if n' to determine which kind of output device you have and either do a nice pic for `t', or an ASCII diagram, assuming at most an 80-char wide terminal, for `n'. That test works on all [nt]roffs. Cheers, Ralph.
