* On 2018 19 Apr 13:13 -0500, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> But the -l option does exactly one thing that is easily described
> in one short sentence that can hardly be misunderstood ("The name
> arguments are interpreted as filenames").As it has been a few days since I first read mandoc's man(1) page (does that make sense?), thinking about it, it may be that the first sentence of -l's description is, "A synonym for mandoc(1) -a." I honestly don't recall if I simply stopped reading there and went on to other options or closed that page and opened mandoc(1) to look at the -a option. As I have looked at it again, as the primary purpose of -l, as I now understand it, is found in the second and third sentences, then the first sentence should be moved after them at the very least or to the end of the description. When I look at mandoc(1), the -a option is described as the output being paginated with more if the output device is stdout. As I read it, it is only concerned with output, not file input. I hope you can see where I got off track. Perhaps rearranging the description of man(1)'s -l option will help others in the future. Anyway, I'm glad this bit of feedback gave you the inspiration to allow direct processing of files with a path name. This is the way Free Software works best when we build off each other. > While the main strength of groff(1) is no doubt high-quality > typesetting, i guess nowadays, more people are using it to read > manual pages than for typesetting work, and i think that most > users are not even aware they are using it. I think this is a very true statement. It was probably about a year ago that I really dug in and learned a bit about the role of groff in man pages. I had bumped into roff by editing some pages but was occupied by other things at the time. That is a bit of a poor track record for someone using Linux since 1996! I know that I was led back here by the failed promises of other "one size fits all" documenting systems. I now prefer the tried and true. - Nate -- "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." Web: http://www.n0nb.us GPG key: D55A8819 GitHub: N0NB
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