Re: [Groff] groff(7) preprocessors

[Bernd Warken]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 12:28:37PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Jun 2001 at 10:37:13 +0200, Bernd Warken wrote:
> > > At least man-db 2.3.16 to 2.3.18 don't know about the 's' preprocessor
> > > specified in groff(7) - what is it? Or is it just a typo?
> > 
> > The 's' preprocessor stands for soelim, which performs the inclusion
> > of files from the .so and .mso requests.  At least mandb-2.3.10 does
> > not have any problems with these inclusions.
> 
> Interesting. Indeed man-db doesn't have any problem with it, but only
> because soelim is run unconditionally and 's' is ignored. :) Andries
> Brouwer's man implementation is similar except that it will print an
> error and then ignore the following 't' for tbl. I don't know what UNIX

Now I can see what you mean, you are right. 'man' does not use the 's'
preproc according to man(1). So it should be removed.

Moreover 'man' seems to be sensitive about a blank preceding the preproc
string and because of the Emacs comment in the first line. Emacs is smart
to recognize the file's identifying string in the second line as well. So
the first line should be adjusted as follows.

./man/groff.n
-'\" st                        -*- nroff -*-
+'\"t
+.\"                        -*- nroff -*-                                       
        

The same applies to the other man page files man/*.n in the groff source.

Bernd Warken <address@hidden>