Re: [Groff] how to use groffer

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Bernd,

> > I've not used it, but a look at the man page suggests
> > 
> >     groffer --debug --ps table
> > 
> > might help?  Or
> > 
> >     strace -fe trace=execve groffer --ps table
> > 
> > to show all the commands it's running and where it might be getting
> > stuck?
> 
> It seems that the bug comes from groff, not only from groffer.  Can
> anyone try to fix this bug?

I did my suggestion above and it looks to me from

    execve("/usr/bin/troff", ["troff", "-Tps", "-",
        "/home/ralph/tmp/groffer_1842_QZTf/,cat_LHzA"], ...)
    execve("/usr/bin/grops", ["grops"], ...)

that troff is being asked to process stdin and only then start reading
,cat_LHzA, which is a copy of the file I gave it.  Typing my EOF
character, Ctrl-D, backs this up, the command continues.

grog suggests the hyphen, probably because it's examining stdin rather
than a filename.

BTW, it seems very impolite for groffer to dump stuff in /home/ralph/tmp
just because it exists.  No environment variable suggests it does so,
e.g. TMPDIR.  Its code just looks for $HOME/tmp and uses it.  That's not
a common convention AFAIK and it isn't what I wanted.

Cheers, Ralph.