4 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
G. Branden Robinson
46fbe4cd00 tmac/tmac.an*: work around formatter bug
...when rendering some man pages, such as those of ncurses.

I did not manage (nor seriously attempt) to identify the root cause of
this bug.  ncurses's use of `SH` and `SS` man(7) macros is
unremarkable.[1]  I cannot account for why the less(1) man page renders
fine and ncurses pages like insstr(3) do not.  But render badly they do,
emitting *roff logic as formatted output.

```
$ 9 nroff -man $(man -w insstr) | grep -F .ss | cat -v
     "'''if^GNAME^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 NAME
     "'''if^GSYNOPSIS^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 SYNOPSIS
     "'''if^GDESCRIPTION^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 DESCRIPTION
     "'''if^GRETURN^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 RETURN VALUE
     "'''if^GNOTES^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 NOTES
     "'''if^GEXTENSIONS^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 EXTENSIONS
     "'''if^GPORTABILITY^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 PORTABILITY
     "'''if^GHISTORY^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 HISTORY
     "'''if^GSEE^GSYNOPSIS^G .ss 18 SEE ALSO
```

With this patch:

```
$ 9 nroff -man $(man -w insstr) | grep -F .ss | cat -v | grep . || echo NO OUTPUT
NO OUTPUT
```

I do observe that the problem seems to correspond to the only use in the
package of the old-fashioned `'''` commenting convention _within a macro
definition_.  I have a notion of how GNU troff works, but little about
AT&T troff.  That said, if I were to try to get to the bottom of this
problem, I'd look into if and how the no-break command character is
handled differently in copy mode.  I see nothing in CSTR #54 to suggest
that the command characters have different meanings in copy mode and its
complement.[2]

My solution is to use idiomatic comment syntax inside macro definitions.

[1] d5dc8a4a7c/man/curs_insstr.3x (L47)

[2] unnamed in AT&T documentation but which I term "interpretation mode"
    in groff
2025-10-26 19:03:55 -04:00
G. Branden Robinson
e5b5757e64 tmac/tmac.an*: support lq, rq strings
The `lq` and `rq` strings are not a groffism, but _almost_ universally
portable to man(7) renderers.

They originate in 4BSD (1980).[1]  They entered Unix System V with SVR4
(1988 or 1989).[2]  mandoc(1) has supported them since its inception.[3]

* tmac/tmac.an:
* tmac/tmac.antimes: Do it.  Use U+201C and U+201D if the output device
  is "utf", otherwise define them as `` and ''.  Don't define them as
  `"` because that breaks when interpolating the strings in macro
  arguments.[4]

[1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4BSD/usr/lib/tmac/tmac.an.new
[2]
e68293af91/sysvr4/svr4/ucbcmd/troff/troff.d/tmac.d/an (L46)
[3] https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/mandoc/predefs.in?rev=1.1&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
[4] https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/Calling-Macros.html

   "For the (neutral) double quote, you have recourse to an obscure
   syntactical feature of AT&T troff. ..."
2025-10-10 13:44:47 -04:00
rsc
c8b6342d3c Many small edits. 2005-01-13 04:49:19 +00:00
rsc
13f7391e4a More files! 2004-05-15 23:45:13 +00:00