FYI: mandoc and/or groff bugs

[Marco S Hyman]

Try printing something like the ipsec man page

groff -man /usr/src/share/man/man4/ipsec.4 | lpr your-ps-printer

then look at the last paragraph. It should read

The IPSec protocol started in 1992, by John Ioannidis, Phil Karn and
William Allen Simpson. In 1995, the former wrote an implementation for
BSD/OS. Angelos D. Keromytis ported it to OpenBSD and NetBSD. The latest
transforms and new features were implemented by Angelos D. Keromytis and
Niels Provos.

The hard copy doesn't. The words "IPSec", "BSD/OS.", and "OpenBSD"
are missing from the hard copy. It seems mandoc and/or groff (don't
know which) can't handle ".Tn" and ".Ox" (among other things).

groff does fine when called via the nroff shell script to create the
man pages.

Also: the troff binary does not match the man page... the default output
is NOT postscript and the -Tps command line doesn't cause postscript
to be generated.

// marc

[Aaron Campbell]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Marco S Hyman wrote:

> Also: the troff binary does not match the man page... the default output
> is NOT postscript and the -Tps command line doesn't cause postscript
> to be generated.

Have you tried this:

groff -mdoc -Tps <man_src_file> > outfile.ps

...then printing the .ps file? As indicated in the FAQ? The URL for that
by the way is http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq2.html#2.3

I've printed several man pages using this method and they look great.

.
: Aaron Campbell <aa...@cs.dal.ca> - [ http://www.biodome.org/~fx ]
`-------------------------------------------------------------------

[Marco S Hyman]

Aaron Campbell writes:

> Have you tried this:
>
> groff -mdoc -Tps <man_src_file> > outfile.ps
>
> ...then printing the .ps file? As indicated in the FAQ? The URL for that
> by the way is http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq2.html#2.3

Sigh... yes, I get different results using -mdoc than using -man or -mandoc.

Sure would be nice if the -mandoc and -mdoc stuff were the same. Then
you could print ALL pages with a single command as currently the -man
tmac file sees which system is being used and process the appropriate files.
The -mandoc option works the same way as the -man macros.

Also, the nroff pages are printed with -mandoc, not -mdoc.

Confusing, no?

// marc

[Todd C. Miller]

In message <22243.9...@dumbcat.snafu.org>
so spake Marco S Hyman (marc):

> Sure would be nice if the -mandoc and -mdoc stuff were the same. Then
> you could print ALL pages with a single command as currently the -man
> tmac file sees which system is being used and process the appropriate files.
> The -mandoc option works the same way as the -man macros.

Yes, this has bugged me for some time. I'll probably resolve it
when I get around to importing the latest groff. I really want
the -Thtml functionality ;-)

- todd