Re: [Groff] confused by soelim

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 14 January 2003 at 15:41:20 -0500, Robert D. Goulding wrote:
> According to info groff, .mso is:
>
> Identical to the `so' request except that `gtroff' searches for the
> specified FILE in the same directories as macro files for the the `-m'
> command line option
>
> .so is marked with a footnote `see gsoelim' - the implication is that
> soelim is needed to read in files specified by both requests.
>
> Also, man groff_tmac (5) make this explicit:
>
> Note that in order to resolve the .so and .mso requests, the roff pre-
> processor soelim(1)  must be called if the files to be included need
> preprocessing.  This can be done either directly by a pipeline on the
> command line or by using the troff/groff option -s.  man calls soelim
> automatically.
>
> But, as far as I can see, at least .mso requests do *not* require soelim;
> and, in fact, soelim is *unable* to resolve them.  Am I missing something?
> I'm asking because I need to know in what order certain local macros and
> external files will be read in to a document.  In particular, I have files
> of refer definitions between .R1 .R2 requests, each corresponding to a
> different journal style; they are kept in my local tmac directory.  I had
> hoped that a file beginning
>
> .mso JOURNALXX.tmac \" Refer customization for JOURNALXX
>
> could be processed with the pipeline soelim | refer - but this doesn't
> seem to work.  I have to make a symlink to the tmac file in the current
> directory, replace .mso by .so and then use soelim.

You don't say what operating system you're using.  I had trouble for
years running soelim under FreeBSD (specifically, it didn't output .lf
directives), until I realized that FreeBSD has its own soelim, which
predates GNU:

 * Author: Bill Joy UCB July 8, 1977
 *
 * ...
 *
 * This is a kludge and the operator should be given the
 * ability to do chdir.

I fixed the .lf problem a couple of months ago in revision 1.9 of
soelim.c.  Looking at the source, it also doesn't handle .mso.  If
you're using FreeBSD, I can probably do a pretty quick fix.
Alternatively, use gsoelim.

Greg
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