Re: gawk manpage: many newlines seem to be missing

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi. I apologize for taking so long to reply to this. The answer is that
any difference in the formatting is the result of changes to the man program
or the man macros, and not the man page itself. I haven't made any substantial
changes to the man page input in a long time.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins

> Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:58:16 +0100
> From: Bauke Jan Douma <address@hidden>
> Subject: gawk manpage: many newlines seem to be missing
> To: address@hidden
>
> Hi,
>
> I am not sure this is a bug, maybe just some quirk in my system's formatting
> of a manpage, but I noticed that the gawk manpage in 3.1.5 is formatted
> differently from the one in 3.1.3.
>
> Before installing gawk-3.1.5, I took a brief look into the manpage for version
> 3.1.3, and subsequently deleted that, and installed a whole new gawk-3.1.5.
>
> That's how I noticed that the old manpage had newlines on all occurences of
> new paragraphs, whereas the manpage for 3.1.5 seems to chain most of the text.
> Example:
>
>
>         the ARGV array for processing.  This is particularly useful for 
> running
>         AWK programs via the "#!" executable interpreter mechanism.   <-- 
> NEWLINE
> AWK PROGRAM EXECUTION
>         An  AWK program consists of a sequence of pattern-action statements 
> and
>         optional function definitions.
>                pattern   { action statements }
>                function name(parameter list) { statements }           <-- 
> NEWLINE
>         Gawk first reads the program source from the program-file(s) if  
> speci-
>         fied, from arguments to --source, or from the first non-option 
> argument
>
> ...
>
>         they occur in the program.
>         Finally, after all the input is exhausted, gawk executes  the  code  
> in
>         the END block(s) (if any).                                    <-- 
> NEWLINE
> VARIABLES, RECORDS AND FIELDS
>         AWK variables are dynamic; they come into existence when they are 
> first
>         used.  Their values are either floating-point numbers  or  strings,  
> or
>         both,  depending  upon how they are used.  AWK also has one 
> dimensional
>         arrays; arrays with multiple dimensions may be simulated.  Several 
> pre-
>         defined variables are set as a program runs; these will be described 
> as
>         needed and summarized below.                                  <-- 
> NEWLINE
>     Records
>         Normally, records are separated by newline characters.  You can 
> control
>         how  records are separated by assigning values to the built-in 
> variable
>         RS.  If RS is any single character, that character  separates  
> records.
>
> ...
>
>         rebuilt when $0 is referenced.  Similarly,  assigning  a  value  to  
> $0
>         causes the record to be resplit, creating new values for the fields. 
> <-- NEWLINE
>     Built-in Variables                                                        
> <-- NEWLINE
>         Gawk's built-in variables are:                                        
> <-- NEWLINE
>         ARGC        The  number  of  command  line  arguments (does not 
> include
>                     options to gawk, or the program source).          <-- 
> NEWLINE
>         ARGIND      The index in ARGV of the current file being processed.
>
>
> Where I've added NEWLINE I would say that the old manpage had a newline 
> separating
> sections or paragraphs (I'm doing this by heart).
>
> If this is not a 'bug' (I wouldn't want to call it that anyway), but some 
> quirk
> on my end in the handling of a manpage, do you have any hint what might fix 
> this?
> I am not too proficient in roff/nroff, etc.  I might add that most manpages 
> are
> formatted correctly, but then again, I spotted this one because I viewed the 
> old
> and new manpage one shortly after the other.
>
> Regards,
>
> Bauke Jan Douma