46fbe4cd00
...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
This is a port of many Plan 9 libraries and programs to Unix.
Installation
To install, run ./INSTALL. It builds mk and then uses mk to run the rest of the installation.
For more details, see install(1), at install.txt in this directory and at https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man1/install.html.
Documentation
See https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/ for more documentation. (Documentation is also in this tree, but you need to run a successful install first. After that, "9 man 1 intro".)
Intro(1) contains a list of man pages that describe new features or differences from Plan 9.
Helping out
If you'd like to help out, great!
If you port this code to other architectures, please share your changes so others can benefit.
Git
You can use Git to keep your local copy up-to-date as we make changes and fix bugs. See the git(1) man page here ("9 man git") for details on using Git.
Status
Contact
-
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/plan9port-dev
-
Issue tracker: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/issues
-
Submitting changes: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/pulls
-
Russ Cox rsc@swtch.com