At 2017-05-04T01:04:48+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Branden,
>
> > .ie c \(lq .ds `` \(lq
> > .el .ds `` ``
> > .ie c \(rq .ds '' \(rq
> > .el .ds '' ''
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> If doesn't work:
>
> $ uname -a
> SunOS unstable11s 5.11 11.2 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise
> $ cat tmp.roff
> .ie c \(lq .ds `` \(lq
> .el .ds `` ``
> .ie c \(rq .ds '' \(rq
> .el .ds '' ''
> >>>\*(``hello world!\*(''<<<
> $ nroff tmp.roff
> >>>hello world!<<<
> $ troff tmp.roff | /usr/lib/lp/postscript/dpost | sed -n '/>>>/,/<<</p'
> (>>>)720 120 w
> 10 R f
> (hello world!)1 499 1 888 120 t
> 10 S1 f
> (<<<)1387 120 w
>
> $ nroff
> >>>
> .ie c \(mi defined
> .el undefined
> <<<
> ^D
> >>> <<<
> $ echo '>>>\(lqhello world!\(rq<<<' | nroff
> >>>hello world!<<<
>
> There are real-world systems (sold today) where neither \(lq
> nor the 'c' conditional is supported. And yes, that kind
> of nroff may be used for manual page display by default:
>
> $ strings `which man` | grep roff
> /usr/lib/sgml/sgml2roff
> troff
> lp -c -T troff
> nroff -u0 -TlpN.B. my comments here are situated in a context _outside_ of the GNU Troff project. Why do my man pages need to be more portable the shell scripts or C code I ship with them? What is the value in reading the _formatted_ version of a man page for a tool that won't compile or run correctly on the host? I refuse to write shell scripts for general-purpose consumption only in the historical Bourne dialect that Solaris /bin/sh was, and I refuse to write man pages for general-purpose consumption only in some minimal common subset that _no one_ has troubled themselves to carefully define. As I've said before, I fear the talk of "safe subsets" and portability in groff_man(7) and man(7) are years out of date and in places anticipated a golden age of direct man-to-HTML rendering that never came to pass for several reasons. I want the "man language" to be small, as I also said before, but not cripplingly so, and I want it to be informed by design, not accidental overlaps in Venn diagrams of traits supported by unmaintained implementations. For example, even if that old Solaris system can render the output of docbook-to-man legibly, that wouldn't mean that docbook-to-man's output is well-considered or a model to emulate in any particulars. Finally, Groff's own portability is sufficiently broad that we should be able to say, "as a rule, if you want man pages written in the past 25 years to render nicely on Boozix 11.0, Gizmoware's custom hybrid of 4.3BSD and SVr3, please build and install Groff so that its macro packages can achieve this for you." Regards, Branden
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