On Wed 19 Mar 2014 20:29:12 Eric S. Raymond wrote: > > If I have misunderstood Eric's intentions with regard to the purpose of > > introducing the .hygiene command, then it would be very helpful if he > > could elucidate further. > > The reason to write .hygiene isn't doclifter, it's to allow other people > to write specialized man page renderers that could be two orders of > magnitude *simpler and faster* than doclifter. That can't happen now > because every viewer has to be nearly a full troff emulator.
So, this change won't just affect the very small number of pages which doclifter can't cope with, but a much larger percentage in order to be of use to other renderers which will not have the AI that is built into Doclifter. Any feel for how many man pages would be affected by the .hygiene command? If you supplied a list of which groff commands you would expect to turn off for man pages, we could do the research ourselves, to save putting work on you. Deri
