Re: [Groff] Re: Simplifying groff documentation

[Larry Kollar]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> > .... I would say a program that
> > claims to read manual pages is broken enough to be irrelevant
> > if it cannot at least handle
> >
> >   .br .fi .nf .sp .ig .in .ti
>
> Doclifter might fail that test.  It ignores .in and .ti, because
> I don't know any way to extract structural information from them.

Taking a brief look at the manpages on my computer, .in and .ti
primarily appear in examples (see unzip.1) or nested lists
(see tcpdump.1). Looking at tcpdump, I expect that it would
give doclifter fits as well.

Anyway, .nf/.fi would almost always signal a listing or some
kind of example, and any .in/.ti appearing in between could be
safely ignored.

Another construct I found in my quick perusal looks like:

  .LP
  .ti +8
  \fBsome error message\fP

The amount of indent isn't important, which is fortunate since
it varies from manpage to manpage. But it looks like .in/.ti can
help to derive structure if doclifter (as I expect it does) can
look at more than just one request/macro at a time.

-- Larry