Re: [Groff] confused by soelim

[Werner LEMBERG]

> .so is marked with a footnote `see gsoelim' - the implication is
> that soelim is needed to read in files specified by both requests.

No.  `soelim' means: `eliminate .so requests'.  groff itself can of
course handle .so requests by itself.

Currently, the cross reference leads to nowhere since the chapter on
soelim in groff.texinfo hasn't been written yet.

> 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 is the job of `soelim'.

> 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?

A longer time ago there was some discussion whether `soelim' should
resolve `.mso', and I came to the conclusion that it would be an abuse
of the `mso' request.

> 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 can avoid the symlink by using the -I option of `soelim'.

Anyway, I agree that this is a missing feature.  The best solution
IMHO is to add an environment variable to `refer', say, `REFER_PATH',
together with a command line variable, say, `-I' or `-m', which
defines a search path for files included with the `include' and
`database' commands of `refer'.

Any volunteer to implement this?


    Werner