Re: groff 1.19.1 complains when formatting its own man pages

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I looked into it some more by using "gdb" and "truss" (it would be
> nice if the original diagnostic had been clearer, but I'm not enough
> of a groff expert to implement that) and discovered that the problem
> is in the following line in the definition of the }S macro in the
> Solaris /usr/share/lib/tmac/an:
> 
> .if "\\$1"2" .if !"\\$5"" .ds ]F\^
> 
> I suspect groff is complaining about the lack of a space between the
> ]F and the \^.  Such a complaint would normally be correct for groff
> input, but here groff is reading from an old-troff macro defined by
> the system, so it shouldn't complain.

With activated compatibility mode, groff processes

  .ds ]F\^

without problems.  I rather suspect that /usr/share/lib/tmac/an is
input without activated compatibility mode.  Please tell me (looking
again at the truss output) which input files in which order are
processed.  The wrapper file for Sun's `an' macro file, `an.tmac',
should consist of these three lines:

  .do mso andoc.tmac
  .cp 1
  .so /usr/share/lib/tmac/an

explicitly activating compatibility mode.  This created `an.tmac' is
normally installed in /usr/local/share/groff/site-tmac, and this
directory is scanned before /usr/local/share/groff/1.19.1/tmac,
holding the standard `an.tmac' file we must not call.

Another possibility for debugging is the following which probably
gives better diagnostic messages:

  groff -ww -mtrace -man ...

`trace.tmac' should work in compatibility mode also, but there might
be glitches.


    Werner